Schrodinger's Kittie

I enjoy helping figure out bugs and such – like why a ticker is a day off on a website; but, spot on with a executable file.  But, sometimes, debugging can be a lot more headache than it’s worth.  There’s a site I’ve been helping with that has a margin that keeps shifting by five pixels when you transfer from one page to another.  I can’t figure out what the trigger is, nor can I figure out any way of making it stop shifting.  I’m tempted to just toss my hands up and leave it well enough alone – but, I know it will bug me to no end if I don’t find the problem.

Anyway – this project is hexxing me.  Well, it’s actually the dominoe effect of the earlier project running over.  The previous project ran over by three weeks, which puts me three weeks into this current project’s schedule…so I start this project three weeks behind.  Lovely, eh?

So far – knock wood – it’s going well.  Except that I can’t find anything that helps me verify that the driver that is loading is the correct version of the driver.  I mean, if I test this whole thing, only to find I’m testing on the wrong version of the driver…well…it won’t be pretty.

I made a decision recently that has hurt someone I care about a lot.  I love them quite a bit, actually.  I’ve never met them in person – but, when we were able to talk and spend time with each other, it was good.  It made me happy and I looked forward to it.  Then things started happening and they would disappear for weeks, sometimes more than a month, and then pop back up.  It became real hit or miss on if I’d get to talk to them at all.  I had offered to bring them out for a visit (before I had something come up to drain all my reserves) and I really wanted it.  I wanted to meet them and see if we’d get along as well in person as we did electronically.  If they were as real and wonderful in person – so many can fake themselves so well online, you know?  But, life kept happening and kept happening…and eventually it was to the point of – keep waiting indefinitely while life keeps happening…or let go. 

It was a hard decision to make and one that, well, hurt.  It hurt me to let go – and, I know beyond any need to guess that I hurt him in doing so.  I find myself wondering from time to time if it was one of those “almost good” decisions my dad has said I make.  I miss talking to him.  I miss the times we talked late into the night (early into the morning).  I miss laughing and playing games with him.  But, we hadn’t done much of that for quite some time prior to this decision.  Life, that pesky thing, kept cropping up and interfering.  Not going to get into it all here. Just a whole lot of things continuing to happen that were weighed in with my choices. 

And, hard as they were to make, and as sad as I am about it – I hope it was the right choice.  Because if it wasn’t – I hurt a man I care about very deeply for no reason.  And the thought that that might even remotely be the case has me in tears.  Why can’t things in life just be crystal clear and easy?  Why are the important decisions generally so muddled and convoluted?  Even if the core of it is clear, there are often so many things around it that ebb and flow that connect and twist all around it…*sighs* 

Anyway – enough of my maudlin self.  It doesn’t matter.  No matter what tomorrow brings, my decision was already relayed and – a treasured person is no longer a part of my life.  I can’t blame him.  I wouldn’t like me very much if I were him, either.

I’ve had a few people ask me over the last couple of weeks what it is, exactly, that I do.

Currently, I am a DVT Engineer for a company that manufactures storage area network (SAN) hardware in the form of chips, host bus adapters, switches, storage services platforms and routers for iSCSI and fibre channel.

What this means is…

After development thinks they have a viable product, we get prototypes sent to us for testing. We make sure it:

a) works
b) performs within specifications
c) is reliable
d) is compatible with various vendors (including our competitors)
e) meets all compliance criteria
f) meets OEM requirements
g) meets standards

DVT stands for design verification testing.

We do this every time a driver, firmware or bios is updated, or a new product is released. And, you know those wonderful drivers that come in your Windows, Red Hat, SuSe, MAC, etc operating systems? Guess who gets to test to make certain that the ones my company makes work? Yeah – my team. So, yes, we have to be conversent in most operating systems – some the “normal” user would never interface with like Xen Source, VM Ware, Solaris and AIX.

Right now, I’m working on a beta operating system that is to be released soon. Verifying that the drivers work, that the boards do what they are supposed to do, that nothing hangs up or crashes the system. What I am not doing is testing their complete operating system – that’s for them to do.

What I am doing is testing our driver and hardware with their operating system installed to make sure the stuff we are responsible for works. Now, if I run across bugs in their operating system while I do this, then I will submit a trouble to them for them to fix…but that’s not part of my job if it doesn’t conflict with our product and is solely an operating system issue. But, I use those products myself, when they hit the market – I kinda like them working. *grins*

Also, the two worlds overlap in a lot of places, so many times I can’t verify that my stuff is working until their stuff gets straightened out. And sometimes, it’s a combination of the two and how they are talking (or not) to each other that is the issue.

I live in a world of bits and bytes…

A world you come into every day if you use things like Flickr, Blogger, GMail, Google, Yahoo or play any online games (World of Warcraft anyone?)…everything that requires massive amounts of storage.

Your company (if it is of a fairly good size) probably even has a SAN setup somewhere to store all the backups of data, email, etc. And in that SAN, I can just about guarantee you will see the name of my company somewhere.

So, update time.

I have a new job with QLogic as a DVT Engineer. It’s going to be challenging and I just hope I can do the job to meet my expectation – and theirs. They are taking a chance on me and I seriously appreciate it.

As for news in my current (soon to be old) job…they decide to give all the Converged group their walking papers….and then expect us to train their lackies that they send down from Denver in a week’s time frame. *eyeroll* Yeah…This network is complicated, people. What part of that aren’t they understanding? It’s not just “MPLS”. It’s not just “VPLS”. It’s not just “frame”. It’s not just “IP”. It’s not just “ATM”. It’s not just “POS”. It’s all of it and more…in one big, Gordian nightmare. The device is flaky on a good day, the “solutions” we have in place are cludgy and horrific to follow…and you know what? I don’t give a flying fig about if they are trained or not. It was their infinite wisdom that had them lay off the whole team – they can suck it up and learn it the hard way, in my opinion. I’m certainly not going to go out of my way to impart the knowledge in my head when they obviously felt it wasn’t necessary to the wellbeing of the company to keep it.

And, if they don’t like it – well, I really don’t have to be here the next week.

Sour grapes, much? Hell yeah.

But, I’m bouncing off the walls excited about QLogic….nervous as all get out – but excited too. It’s just such a grand opportunity and I don’t wanna mess it up.