Poetic Intensity

Just wanted to let ya’ll know that my new blogging / journaling site now has an RSS feed for your viewing pleasure.

Hi guys. All my blog posts can now be found at this site

http://www.ilovemyjournal.com/?action=personal_entries&user=1

Okay… So, I’ve been reading quite a bit about cats lately (in blogs of others) and looking at all the freaking / crazy / awesome cat pics people have out there.. I just have to add my two cents.

I grew up with cats.  I love cats.  I pretty much love everything about em’, except when they wake me up by their incessant meowing outside the window where they know I’m sleeping, so I’ll get up and let them back inside.

I currently have two cats.  Silver and Riley.  They hate each other, but that’s a different story.

Silver is a black short-hair tom cat.  Riley is a big puffy cream-colored queen who happens to have a temper.

But, before I go into the now, lemme tell you about the greatest cat ever.

Enter Charlie.  Charlie was a fantastic cat.  Great with kids, very cuddly and soft.  You know the type.  Well….  Charlie was also a great hunter.

Two stories about Charlie:

1. We lived in an apartment at the time and would leave a window cracked open so Charlie could go in and out at his leisure.  Well…  We learned that Charlie was a great hunter when he brought a quarter-dead, mostly maimed, but still able to move quite quickly bird in through the window.  He thought it was great!  He let it loose and that bird went nuts running all over.  My wife came into the room and just about died.  My wife doesn’t have much experience with cats, so…. she didn’t think it was as awesome as I would have (I was at work, she told me the story on the phone as it was happening).  So… She started yelling and swatting at it with a broom, while Charlie just sat and enjoyed the spectacle.  Sarah didn’t like that too much, and as soon as she realized she wasn’t having too much success with the bird, she realized that Charlie was just sitting there, thoroughly enjoying himself.  So, she started swatting him with the broom instead.  Charlie got the hint, caught the bird and quickly left the house.  Man, I wish I would have been there.  I still laugh about that one. (this happened about 3.5 years ago)
2. We were leaving the same apt. one Sunday morning to go to church.  It was the wintertime and very cold.  Upon leaving, we noticed a small little furball curled up in the corner of one of our steps.  It was a mouse which was surely trying to suck up any warmth it could by the door.  We left it there out of pity, instead of killing it.  While I was on my way to church I thought to myself, “That mouse is as good as dead if Charlie is outside”.   3 hours later, we came back and noticed that the mouse was not around anymore.  We opened the door, and dead-smack in the middle of the living room was the hind end of a mouse with the *ahem* other end completely gone.  Poor mouse.

Anyway….  I love cats.   I thought you all should know.

The end.

I don’t really have that much to write about now, but I can say that I successfully connected to Oracle with PHP the other day.

I’m not too proud in saying so, other than it took me two days to finally figure it out.  But that isn’t something to be proud of, either.

Let’s just say that connecting to Oracle is *much* more of an ordeal than Postgres or MySQL.  I’ll be pullin’ data from it soon now, so hopefully getting records from it is much easier than successfully creating a connection.

Thanks for …… reading.  *yawn*

I’ve been strugging on how to blog about what’s been going on, and I’m sick of thinking about it, so here I go.

About a month ago, I was sitting at my happy job, getting paid pretty well, liking very much, for the most part, the environment which I had been blessed to work in for the past 1 1/2 years, when an email came to my inbox from the UPHPU jobs-announcement list. I still am in awe that I even responded half-heartedly to this post. You’ll see why. The email is below in italics:

SUMMARY: Utilizing a thorough knowledge of programming and server
software operations, develops custom programs written in languages as
Perl, C, C++, Java, Active X and VRML (Virtual Reality Modeling
Language) design to enhance user appeal and utility as well as the
site’s overall functionality. Creates Web front-end user interface to
new or existing database using a combination of HTML (Hyper Text Mark-
Up Language) and SQL, C, Visual Basic or other languages to make
business applications web accessible

ESSENTIAL DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES include the following. Other
duties may be assigned.
· Responsible for developing and maintaining Nature’s Way
Website
· Oversee, troubleshoot and maintain the website
· Provide analysis and development for
· Analyze needs and write Reports with emphasis on supporting
Sales, Marketing, Customer Service and Finance
· Consult with internal and external contacts pertaining to
various business requirements
· Stay abreast of current technologies and specifically
recommend strategic changes to improve all computer systems
· Suggest and promote the use of information systems to
fulfill corporate goals
· Work with vendors to ensure high quality and economical
service and supplies
· Excellent team player willing to assist department members
as needed and support corporate and departmental objectives

QUALIFICATION REQUIREMENTS: To perform this job successfully, an
individual must be able to perform each essential duty
satisfactorily. The requirements listed below are representative of
the knowledge, skill, and / or ability required. Reasonable
accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to
perform the essential functions.

EDUCATION and/or EXPERIENCE: Must have a Bachelor’s degree (B. A.)
from a four-year college or university plus a minimum of four years
related experience and/or training; or equivalent combination of
education and experience. Must have knowledge of XML and Visual
Basic. Knowledge of SAP functional configuration helpful. Possess
working knowledge of Microsoft Office application software.

OTHER SKILLS and ABILITIES: Ability to function under high stress
with a sense of urgency. Excellent troubleshooting skills. Excellent
interpersonal skills. Must be proactive and have self-initiative.
Must have excellent planning skills and the ability to be meticulous
in details. Experience both with UNIX and Windows based platforms.
Skilled in the use of report tools, ODBC, SQL and data warehousing to
store and/or extract strategic and tactical information for decision-
making. General knowledge of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) with
emphasis in Sales, Marketing, Customer Service, Finance and CRM is
essential. Familiarity with SAP BASIS would be extremely beneficial.

Location:
Springville, UT 84663

Salary/Wage:
55,105.00 - 91,509.00 USD /year
Based on Experience

Status:
Full Time, Employee

Job Category:
Information Technology

Relevant Work Experience:
2+ to 5 Years

Career Level:
Manager (Manager/Supervisor of Staff)

Education Level:
Bachelor’s Degree

Email:
jobs@naturesway.com

Such statements as “develops custom programs written in languages as
Perl, C, C++, Java, Active X and VRML (Virtual Reality Modeling
Language)” and “Must have knowledge of XML and Visual
Basic. Knowledge of SAP functional configuration helpful.” kinda made me queasy. I don’t know JACK about any of those. Why in the WORLD would I apply for this position? heh… the phrase “only the Lord knows why” comes to mind, as I smile…

Yup, I felt that I should respond, and at the time - heaven was the only place where any knowledge was had about why. Here’s my response:

To whom this may concern:

My name is Jason Jones, and I live in Springville, UT. I am a member of a Utah-based developers’ group named Utah PHP Users Group, from which group I saw your employment opportunity.

I’ve been in professional back-end web development for approximately 4 years, and have a B.S. degree from UVSC. I excel in PHP programming, SQL, and most front-end technologies including JavaScript, DHTML, CSS, AJAX, and of course, HTML. I’m also familiar with Actionscript. I enjoy taking pride in creating code to evolve and become a well-oiled machine. I have used this pride to assist business models to excel through technology.

If my inexperience with VB scripting excludes me from this opportunity, no need to reply. If you’re open to the possibilities of employing a hard-worker who knows how to use technology to further business goals unimpeded, feel free to contact me.

And there ya have it. After writing that, I honestly had no intention of hearing back from Nature’s Way. Little did I know. Some time after (only a couple of days), I received this email:

Jason,

Thank you for your interest in the Web Developer position here at Nature’s Way. Please send your resume.

Thanks,

Andrea Clifford

HR Generalist, Nature’s Way

I didn’t feel at all comfortable about sending them my resume, so I called Andrea instead. I told her of my situation with my current job as well as my feeling loyal to Truenorth Academy, for they really had provided me with a fantastic employment. She told me she wouldn’t contact them, and her happy, direct, and honest approach set me at ease quickly - so I gave her a link to my resume. She said she’d forward it on to the head of the IT dept. Soon thereafter, I received this email:

Jason,

After reviewing your resume, we would like to meet with you for an interview. When are you available?

Andrea

I responded with this:

Andrea,

Thank you for this opportunity! And to think, I almost didn’t reply to your original employment post.

As far as interview times go, I work from 9-6 in American Fork, Mon-Fri. Anytime around those hours would be fine. Assuming a 30-minute interview, sometime before 8:00am, after 6:00pm, or sometime during mid-day (around noon) would be fine. Tomorrow and Friday probably wouldn’t work out during the evening hours, as I have prior arrangements. Tonight would work out great for me, come to think of it. Sometime around 7:00pm? Other than that, I’m pretty open.

Thanks again.

–Jason

I then proceeded to set up a first interview with Nature’s Way on the 15th of May. The first interview went *very* well. The people in the room were very impressive in both their knowledge and demeanor. It was a *very* happy / light environment. We laughed as much as we talked. Good times.

At the end of the interview, they asked me if I had any questions, and I told them, “yes…. I do.” I then asked them,

“Why are you even considering me a candidate for this position? I don’t know anything about the technologies you employ here.”

They then responded by telling me that it was more the experience and work ethic they were interested in, rather than the actual technology used. They then told me I could re-write the code using technologies I was familiar with, and if hired - it would be perfectly fine to ditch the M$-based technologies in favor of PHP and Apache.

So, I was happy, they were happy, and they proved it by asking me to come back for a 2nd interview the following week. So, I did.

The following Monday morning at 8:00, I went in for round two. When I entered the room, I noticed a person there who wasn’t familiar to me. He introduced himself to me as “Ron”, and I knew I had seen him before.

To keep this entry from becoming too elongated, let’s just say that we both knew we knew each other, didn’t know from where, decided to go on with the interview, about 2 minutes into the interview, I remembered where I had seen him. I had been interviewed by him before! To be hired by him! I was kinda scared, because they never called me back. So….

After the technical question pelting had ended with me able to answer all of em’ aptly, I decided to let Ron know that I knew from where I recognized him. He squinted a bit, and then his face lit up. “I remember you!” He exclaimed. “I was interested in hiring you, but my partners were twits. We never really got much going for that business, anyway…” So… When he said that, I knew I was in a pretty good position.

As we parted ways, Ron told me that on a scale from 1 to 10, I perfomed at a “9″ level at answering his questions, and that was that!

It would be that weekend that I would get a phone call from Andrea offering me the job at the rate I requested (which, at the time, I thought was absurdly high). I, however, never got the phone call. All I got was a very diplomatic voicemail which neither confirmed nor denied the acceptance or rejection of my employment there. So, I called her work phone, but she was already gone for the day. I then decided it was worth it to call her home. I googled her home number, and called it 4 times. The 4th time was when she answered, with a tone thinking that I was a telemarketer. I explained and apologized profusely, and as soon as she knew who I was, all was well. In in the end, she told me they were interested in hiring me.

I crapped my pants.

Then I went out and told my wife who was playing volleyball with my in-laws.

Anyway…. Pretty crazy. Man, I’m tired.

I then had to tell Jim, my boss, that I was leaving. NOT FUN. I ended up having to tell him probably close to 7 or 8 times that there was basically nothing within reason he could do to keep me there, simply because this job felt right. I also ended up telling Mike Gillespie (the CEO of Treunorth Academy) the same thing…. The reason for that decision has quite the story, part of which you arleady know.

You see. I never should have applied for this job. It was everything I wasn’t interested in learning. Something prompted me to reply, so I did. The rest you know…

But, just because I know I’m supposed to take this job, doesn’t make leaving Truenorth any less difficult. I love working with those people. I built an application which dwarfs pretty much anything I’ve ever done before. It’s just been a great environment, and I don’t want to leave it. But, I have to. God knows why, and I’m about to find out.

Tomorrow’s my last day at Truenorth Academy, and I’ve gotta say, it’s been one heckuva ride. Made a lot of friends, learned a lot, regained work ethic I knew I had, and was pushed to various limits within myself - and exceeded them.

We’ll see what ride Nature’s Way will give me.

Here’s to hopin’!

I’ve been reading the scriptures a bit lately, and I came upon a verse which intrigued me. That verse quickly made me think of this one, and this one. Let’s not forget this one - that’s a good one, too - verse 33 being the focus.

Here’s another really good one warning of the dangers of the previous entries, and further proving the point that at least some of the previous entries mean “rich” in the sense of having lots of temporal stuff. You know, “rich“.

Hopefully you’ve read all the links above because I’m assuming you have.

Here’s the skinny. My whole life has been one “upgrade” after the next. Jobs and money (to a certain extent) have fallen from the sky to me, and continue to do so. I honestly feel I don’t deserve any of this good fortune because I know myself well, and I’m overly aware of all my shortcomings.

My upbringing was pretty darned good. Kudos to my parents. They did one heckuva job raising me in light and truth, and I thank them for it.

One thing, however, I think that my parents didn’t emphasize, and isn’t emphasized in my religion either, is temporal blessings. Now, obviously, I know why. The last link above is *precisely* why. Helaman explains it best, by far.

As soon as we’re blessed and rich and lavish and have everything we could possibly ever want, what happens? Yeah, that happens.

We forget all about the source of our blessings, and more than that, we tend to remember all too well our own pride and holy cow. We all know too well where pride leads us.

Soooo…. Yeah. I guess the whole point of this entry is concerning a bewilderment I’ve had pretty much my whole life. The Lord says he’ll bless us. My parents and church have taught me that “blessed” means “spiritually blessed”. My own research has led me to believe that in addition to it is also “temporal blessings“, meaning riches - gold, silver, flocks, glory, etc… So… Here’s my quandry:

Why are some righteous people poor? Pretty open-ended question, if ya ask me, but in my life, I don’t consider myself even close to being as righteous as I could be, and yet - I’m blessed far beyond the blessings I often see in others. I’m not exactly sure why, other than these two things:

• I seriously believe and am convinced that God gives us exactly what we want. What we really want. This is a whole discussion unto itself, but suffice it to be explained this way: If I want a new Ferrari, my want will turn into actions and a series of events which will ultimately lead to my obtaining my want. If I sit in bed and dream of a Ferrari, it will only be in my dreams. I believe God has a large role in the actions of our lives.
• The next reason I think blessings are seemingly disproportionate among the world is that God is the ultimate judge of all things, and people. God is the only person who knows our hearts and desires. I believe that if we desire money, as Jacob says, to do good and serve others, we will eventually get it. If not, then it’s left to us and our own devices. And heck, some people don’t even want it in the first place. Ain’t nothing wrong with that!

Anyway. Just somethin’ to chew on. It sure has been an object of much “chewing on” in my life for the past 4-5 years.

I guess I’m just having a hard time accepting the blessings God grants to me while seeing others who are struggling to make a fraction of what has been given to me. It’s up to me to decide how to use my own blessings.

Hopefully I’ve chosen wisely. Probably not, but… hopefully.

The answer to that question in today’s world is “Not on your life.” However, in a perfect utopia, the answer would definitely be, to a degree, “yes”.

A couple of days ago, I was really gettin’ down into myself and thinking about things, when I started thinking about the state of the world. Holy cow, that could open, not only a can of worms, but rather a can of dunecats. Heh….

Anyway… In a perfect world, Christ would be king, peace would reign world-wide, and yes… Love is pretty much all we would need. This could easily lead into a plethora of conversations on various implications of what the definition of “utopia” really means, and… blah blah blah. I’d rather take this into spiritual realm.

What would happen if everyone on earth took the advice of the “two great commandments” ? Wow, what a total change of lifestyle we would all experience. I imagine within just a few generations, nobody would experience any type of fear, jealousy, envy, spite, of course there would be no hatred, backbiting, stealing, or anything that comes of any of it. Nah…. I can’t imagine it.

I guess one reason I was thinking of all this is probably due to a heightened sense of anxiety within me. I’ve been feeling this way for probably the past 2 weeks. I’m not entirely sure why, but I’ve got a pretty good idea.

Without going into much detail, let me just say that within my life has entered a scenario where I spend a lot of time with feelings of unrest radiating from other people. I converse with these people quite a bit, and due to my being around this type of aura, I believe I’ve taken a certain portion of it into my life. To put it bluntly, I don’t like it one bit.

It was at this point, realizing from where this sense of unrest inside myself came, that I started to think about love. Something very sacred to me, given to me from someone I trust contains a quote therein directed at me. This quote said,

“Cherish the spirit of peace that love may abound in your soul.”

Well… Lately, I haven’t been “cherishing the spirit of peace” much.

So, what can I do about it? Well, as of right now, I’m not too sure. I definitely cannot control other people, but I can to a high degree control how much of my environment I integrate into myself. Anywho…

Something I’ve learned from this experience is that I cannot integrate certain forms of evil into my life without it affecting my general sense of well-being. If, while I’m away from my family, I decide to make wrong choices - and I make them often enough that I start to believe that these wrong choices really aren’t so “wrong”, my life as a whole will be affected - no matter how hard I try to cover it up while I’m around my family. I’m definitely a person who can’t hide himself too well. I can’t act “at peace” while I’m really “at unrest”. I just can’t do it. So I’ve gotta do better with my life.

I think that has to be about it for tonight. I’ll read this over and make sure it makes sense. …. Bah… No I won’t.

G’nite.

Okay… I don’t have a lot of time to write, but for goodness sake, if I didn’t - I’d be doing myself a great dis-service.

I just spent the past 6 hours trying to follow a simple tutorial to get MySQL authentication against Postfix + Courier so I could setup an emergency email server our company desperately needed since Friday.

I woke up this morning at midnight to get to work. I didn’t want to break the sabbath, so I was just hoping the configuration / installation would be at least semi-easy. This wasn’t too much of a stretch, since I’ve been the admin of various gentoo servers over the past few years. Well, I was half-way right.

If I would have been using gentoo, the installation and configuration would have been done about 4 hours ago. Let me back up.

Saturday night, three admins here spent the night / morning getting a server ready for configuration. One of the two admins here is a SuSE whiz and since our CTO here is insanely anti-gentoo (only heaven knows for whatever reason), he was going to take over the main server configuration and I was to provide backup support where ever it was needed. Totally cool. I don’t mind being the backup since configuring an RPM-based Linux distro is FAR, FAR, FAR away from what I ever will want to do ever again.

Well… Saturday night went fine, but….

Sunday, I went home and took a couple of naps to prepare for this morning’s duties. After my nap, I called my manager to see the status, and he informed me that Scott (the SuSE whiz) was at the hospital with his wife, having their 2nd baby (a little boy!). Wow! Congratulations, Scott! That’s awesome!

So, since my manager (one of the three techs) is an MS-SQL DBA, and doesn’t know very much about Linux at all, that put me in the hot-seat to get an email server running by this morning (3 hours from now it has to be working 100%).

“Cool”, I thought. I’ll just go in, and get it set up. No biggie.

1 hour after I arrived here, I had MySQL tables all set up, courier-authlib installed and configured, as well as postfix. I started it all up and tried to send my first email to the box.

I sent the message and almost immediately, I got a message saying “Screw you.”

So… I started debugging logs and whatnot, and quickly found out that Scott had got a little ways into the email configuration sometime Sunday morning, and had tried to configure the email with aliases. I was trying to do it with virtual hosts / MySQL. The alias table was overriding the whole MySQL config, so I deleted the alias config parameter, tried to sent / receive email again with exactly the same resulting message.

Now, for the next 5 hours (until about 10 minutes ago), I was banging my head on every conceivable problem, going through multiple tutorials and scouring every log I could find. Nothing was making sense, until I read in a tutorial somewhere “Make sure the MySQL modules are loaded in Postfix.”

ah-hah!

So, I loaded YaST2, typed in “postfix-mysql” in the search bar, and….. nothing came up. So… I searched for it online, and found it using pbone.net. I downloaded the file, wondered what chaos I was going to create by inserting it using RPM (because I have no idea how to integrate the RPM into the yast repository), but I didn’t care. So I ran #rpm -Uvh postfix-mysql, said a little prayer, and tried to send a message.

Success! The message was sent!

I tried to get the message I had just successfully sent to myself. “Screw you.” came up almost immediately. gah….

Another hour went by before I figured out how to enable intense debugging in the courier-authlib module. I restarted the service, and debugging output told me that it couldn’t find libauthmysql.so. That’s a problem. I immediately knew it must be because I didn’t have yet another RPM to install. So, I found it (of course, it’s not in YaST), downloaded it, installed it, restarted the courier service and tried to get test messages.

Bingo.

Moral of the story is this:

Why in the world would anyone want to go through the havoc of having multiple RPMS needed to do a job, but not knowing which ones, and not having a system smart enough to say “Hey, you might wanna go grab postfix-mysql.rpm, and courier-authmysql.rpm, because you’re gonna need em’.”? Why, why, why!??!

With gentoo, it would be overly obvious due to the simple USE flags set up to tell me exactly what options are installed into the packages with which I am working. I would have known the problem within seconds by simply running

#emerge -pv postfix courier-authlib

The USE flags would tell me exactly what the problem was.

Now, I’m sure some of you are thinking “Yeah, but man… it takes FOREVER to compile using gentoo!” My reply is: “Yeah… and I was in an RPM abyss of not knowing what options are compiled in, and what packages are needed due to the inability to compile my own options for 5 FREAKING HOURS!” Compiling postfix and courier-authlib would have taken about 20 minutes.

gentoo++

Okay. I’ve gotta write this down for two reasons:

1. So I don’t forget what I just figured out.
2. I hope to high heaven someone doesn’t have to go through what I just did to figure something THIS SIMPLE.

On with the story.

Well, about 2 months ago my server started acting strangely. The most notable symptom of this strangeness was manifested by a pause whenever I ssh’ed into my server. I’d type in the ssh console command and there was an inevitable 3-4 second wait before I got prompted for a username / password.

Keep in mind, people, that this started two months ago.

I went through forums, IRC channels, mailing lists, etc. Dedicated hours and hours and hours of studying trying to figure out what the cause might be (because, keep in mind, this problem wasn’t just limited to ssh. Virtually *any* network connection had this irritating 3-second delay. Not acceptable.)

Anyway… To cut to the chase, I quickly figured out that the cause was most likely DNS-related. So, I modified all sorts of configuration options in my sshd_config file, as well as my /etc/resolv.conf, /etc/hosts, /etc/conf.d/domainname, /etc/ssh_config files. NOTHING would change anything. Until I found this link in the wonderfully helpful gentoo forums. The link didn’t really give me any direct answers, but somewhere in there, “the order of the DNS entries” was mentioned. I immediately cycled through all my previous 2 months’ research in my head and realized that my workstation’s DNS entries were in exactly the opposite order as my server’s DNS entries. Holy Baghdad!

So, about 3 minutes ago, I ssh’ed into my server, waited the obligatory 3-4 seconds to login, changed the DNS entries, restarted my nic card, logged out, tried to ssh back in and……

BOOM.

no wait. None at all. I was accessing my server within milliseconds…..again…..as I had for so long previous to the two-month hell I was resigning myself to accept as reality.

Moral of the story?

THE ORDER OF YOUR DNS ENTRIES INSIDE THE /ETC/RESOLV.CONF FILE IS EXTREMELY IMPORTANT! USE THE GOOD ONES FIRST!

Heh…. it only took me two months to figure that one out… Freak. And I call myself a developer.

Ohwell… Here’s to stupid little tid-bits of seemingly insignificant technical knowledge causing the best of us enormous amounts of pain!

Woot!

(edit: I also was thinking wordpress was horribly bloated due to the 1-2 minute wait (yes, I said 1-2 minute wait) I was experiencing after each press of the “publish” button. Right after I published this, not surprisingly, it took less than 2 seconds to give me that flashy color-changing “you’re now famous…..again.” bar at the top. Yup…. I guess DNS is pretty important.)

Holy cow.  My journal is done.  I still can’t believe it.  Wowza.

I started writing in my journal every day on January 1st, 1990.  About ten years later, I found that I had journals scattered all over the place, and with my technical background - I hated the disorganization of something that might be precious someday.  Who knows.  So….  I put it all into a database.  Not sure what I’m gonna do with it…  But… it’s done.  Just under 3000 entries from January 1990 -April 2007.  Anyway…  Just thought I’d let ya’ll know.  I’m happy I’m finally done.