sitrep

[catsidhe]

83. Must not start any SITREP (Situation Report) with “I recently had an experience I just had to write you about….”
—— The 213 things Skippy is no longer allowed to do in the U.S. Army

So. Tomorrow I find myself double-booked. I am to come in early to be in one building at 9:00 am sharp (under some scornful pressure — to the point that I suspect a level of punishment is involved) to begin the task of unpacking a lab's worth of computers ready for set-up and ghosting, and appear to also be invited to a meeting at 9:30 sharp, to investigate why three entire labs in another building are, in fact, not fit for purpose, and presumably to receive an implicit bollocking from several directions for not having done it right, or quickly enough, despite my doing the entire fucking building — seven lab's worth so far, five to go, across four separate VLANs, with new and mostly unconfigured switches, with an image which is still being modified by the academics — effectively all by myself. (Just as Bruce and Thomas have done OE, and Howard has done SEECS, and M has done all two dozen machines in Geo.) I suspect, but can't prove at the moment, that there are more machines in my building and under my responsibility than there are in the rest of the school. Oh, and the ghost server itself turns out to be flaky. I'm on my second Abbotsford Invalid (shut up, I'm not normally a big drinker), and considering turning up tomorrow bright and early and still drunk.

Friday, I spent the day first finalising the special image which I spent stripping down from 45GB by removing six packages and 12GB, so as to fit it on machines with 40GB hard drives. These are the aforementioned unfit-for-purpose machines. I then spent most of the rest of the day discovering that stuff needed to be fiddled with in the server before anything would happen, talked to a sysad and, after he figured out what needed to be done, and did it, proceeded to discover that one of the labs was even older than we thought, and did not have the correct network drivers, which I had to install one by one by hand, then finish off the configuration, and eventually left a bit before a quarter to nine at night. Thomas himself has worked over several weekends, so it has been suffering shich has been distributed. But still, doing all the labs in my building, after having almost single-handedly built the damn aforementioned 45GB image in the first place, on my own, has been an exhausting, deathmarch slog. And, I expect, largely thankless.

Wah wah wah, my life suxxors wah wah wah fuck.




Also, I wonder at my hearing. Last time I was tested, the last time I wondered at it, I tested with perfectly adequate hearing.

And yet, and yet... it struck me again today that my hearing may be perfectly good (and thanks to education from an early age on the damage that can be done, probably better than many of my age), but yet I really suck at the sort of filtration that everyone else seems to take for granted. I call it ‘Cocktail Party Deafness’, after the ‘Cocktail Party’ effect, whereby a person can pick out one conversation out of many, and if some attention is drawn, may do so retrospectively. I can sort of do that, but it's hard. Very hard. Picking one conversation out from any distracting noise I find difficult to a fault, and if the distractions are other conversations, then it can become damn near impossible. At the fish-and-chip shop indeed, I could barely figure out what the lass serving was saying over the radio playing. No-one else seemed to have a problem. I tend to do a lot of contextual extraction to get the gist of a conversation, and I'm not sure that it is normal to need to do so as much as I do. I don't have a problem with single sources, it does not seem to be a problem with the physical apparatus, but with the filtering mechanism. And I don't know that there is anything to be done about it but continue to cope. Or whatever. I don't even know if there is anything wrong.