Scheduled events. Tuesday and Wednesday this week, and Tuesday next I see my vision care people. At the end of those visits my vision ‘work’ is completed, though I will still have healing to do. That is actually expected to take some 6 months or so. Over a little more than another month I’ll be getting drops in my eye, mostly hourly, though a couple of them will be on reducing schedules.
Next up, and it can start earlier, is to build a firewall. Not your average firewall, but one with a few more features added in. This is almost a commercial grade firewall, but I’ll be using a small form factor box to build it. Firs up it will have something like 4 or more WAN interfaces. I’m not going to be setting up 4 or 5 boxes to service specific IP addresses, especially when the targets are going to be separate boxes within my network. In any case, the standard implementation process will be followed. Design first, test in the production environment.
Isn’t that how everyone really does this? Oh they espouse best practices, ‘design, test in lab, throw serious problems at it in the lab, it will run smoothly in production.’ However what they gloss over is that no matter what they do with testing in the lab, the real world involves situations that they are not prepared to test ahead of time. Two days after they deploy, someone comes up with a hack they hadn’t thought of.
What do I mean about implementing some unusual features? Ok, I’m going to include the ability to manage the network over a secure connection. That includes managing the firewall. And by secure I don’t mean simply that I terminate a vpn on one of the boxes. There may be VPNs traversing my firewalls, but none that will be opened from an outside connection and have the ability to manage the devices in my network. I have a couple of domains that are going to be hosting web pages on standard ports, that are going to be either running on separate boxes, or will be running different server software. Apache is nice for a lot of stuff, but I have a project that looks like a python server will be better for.
Obviously those are also things that need to be hashed out.
Some where in all of this I’m also expecting to take on some new rolls. I’ve a couple of parties to plan out, neither will happen in the next month, but planning needs to happen anyway. I also am going to be working on a couple of conventions.
I explained my ‘schedule’ to a friend this weekend, who looked at it and declared that she thought her schedule was complicated, but it was nothing compared to mine. Well, perhaps. The reality is that my schedule really differs from others in that my work week is rotated 12 hours from everyone else, offset by three days, and squeezed by a day. The major complication for me is that my work week eats into what other people think of as a weekend. A minor complication is that if I want to get things done, see doctors, go shopping, I need to find places that keep somewhat odd hours, or rotate the ‘day’ for my weekend.
Even people I work with on other shifts don’t always seem to get the issues. I would love to attend an all hands meeting. However if it is scheduled for 1 pm on Friday, I’m not attending. Friday is the first ‘day’ where I have a serious chance of getting some sleep between full 12 hour work shifts. I can handle the aggravation on a Saturday, and might be able to work something out on a Thursday, but not on a Friday. Of course Friday is the best day for management. Oh well.
Somewhere in the schedule needs to be working out, eating, and hopefully some pleasant social activities. I’m not sure I’m very good at that last, but…
