In yesterday’s post I explained some weird activity in my RAID backup server. Well, it turns out that it was just calm before the storm. Thankfully, that storm was nothing more than a little rain. The backup server started working again, without issue, after I pushed the drives back into place. When I awoke today I noticed that the disk status light beside drive 1 was off. I tried reseating it but the light would not go back on. I figured that maybe something happened to the circuitry in the unit and the LED is no longer receiving power. ...

It turns out that the heating and cooling of the unit over the past 5 years caused the HDDs to slip out of their connectors. All I needed to do was nudge 3 out of 4 of them back into place (I didn’t need to reseat them, just push them back in) and the unit started working again. Crazy. This incident now has me thinking about backups for my backups. ...

Knock-on Effect: A secondary, often unintended effect. While I don’t typically write it down, I have often provided my thoughts about Vancouver’s real estate market when I speak to others in person. Vancouver has had a run-up in real estate for 9 years now, one of the largest and longest real estate bubbles ever. Oh, did I say “bubble”? Many people won’t admit that it is a bubble, and yet there is little else to explain housing prices that have doubled – nay, tripled – in nearly 10 years. This false wealth by rising real estate values has caused a lot of snobbery and abusive spending, causing inflation in many ways. ...

One of the things that really irks me almost daily is the incessant use of SSO 1 services such as Facebook, Twitter, and Google by external services. These are services whereby they do not require you to setup your own account on their system and, instead, ask you to sign in with an existing account through Twitter or any of the other authentication providers. This in turn is supposed to keep your authentication details private from external services. ...

One of the things that I like to do in my personal life and in my corporation is control the books. Since I am responsible if the corporation fails, and if mismanaged money is the surest way to failure, then I better control where that money comes and goes. To this, I make myself the bookkeeper (with my wife, who verifies the work). As for accounting, I outsource that stuff to an accountant because it is much too complicated for me to spend so much time on it. That, and he saves me more than what he charges, so it’s a good deal. ...

You may or may not have noticed but the user icon in the sidebar is a link to my profile (or, resume if you will). Clicking on it will show you first the range of skills that I have. I have separated these skills into two areas – Business and Technical – due to the type of work that I target. However, it doesn’t necessarily show the full range of my skills, otherwise it would be a very long read and very boring for the reader. This is not me patting myself on the back, but there are a lot of skills that everyone has that they use in a workplace that don’t need to be written down. For example, my typing skills are very good (80+ wpm, touch-type) but I’m not going to write that down unless it was somehow dependent on my getting a specific type of job. But this is not the point of my article. ...

For as long as I remember, I have always been enamoured by the latest in technology, especially when it comes to design, development and organization of data and thoughts. I have used spreadsheets, Trello and various other tools to do all my work… and yet, there is something always missing from these tools that causes me to go back to my trusted favourite: pen and paper. When I have told people this story I have received myriad responses, from the eye-roll to a full-on guffaw. I’m not sure what it is about using a seemingly luddite toolset to develop in a high-tech atmosphere, but it really brings out the worst in people. ...

This Bloomberg article answers exactly what I’ve been questioning for the past 8 years: how is it that people in Canada (and Vancouver, in particular) can afford to live such extravagant lives? Well, the answer is that they can’t. And I knew that they couldn’t live their lives like that, but I never had any empirical evidence to back it up. The article displays the following graphic at the top, to highlight just how screwed us Canadians are in the near term. ...

Continuing the theme from yesterday about burnout, it is important to identify the signs and symptoms of burnout. This Wikipedia article on burnout is chock full of good details, and I advise you to look there for reference as I talk about each symptom. As I go through each phase of burnout, I detail what I unknowingly did in that phase, in the hope that someone out there can recognize what they are currently doing and prevent it from happening further. I feel quite exposed writing about all of this, mainly because of the feeling that people will see me as fallible but it is all part of the process of learning and growing. ...

Being the 10th anniversary of when this story took place, I would like to tell a story today. It is one of the many stories that I tell each of my student mentees each year. At first it may seem like I am airing dirty laundry, but the purpose of this parable is that the reader can hopefully steer clear of the mistakes I made once upon a time. I was working at the main IT department for UBC (then called ITServices, it is now called UBCIT) as a software developer. It was my first job after graduating from UBC (I previously held the job before graduation, but that’s beside the point). I had been working at UBC for 2 years before a new project was started: Campus Wide Login (CWL). At the time, this project was revolutionary. It was a single sign-on (SSO) system that would obsolete the various usernames and passwords around the campus, and centralize it all into one system. The design was based on Kerberos which is a ticketing system, very similar to today’s OAuth2 system. ...