#if i had access to the internal server database i would do it my damn self but i don’t!!!!!!!

[evilrry]

.

[tales-of-cs]

My Sister The SysAdmin

Growing up with my older sister Jaden, I never had to wonder where she was in the house or what she was doing, because she was always in her room, under her loft bed, on her laptop. My father had loaned my sister and I each a spare from his office, and I swear it was like Jaden would be damned if she didn’t use it for all it had left. She was an avid fan of computer games, but would also take time to really understand the machine she was using. As a little kid, whenever I would run into a problem with my laptop, she would be able to fix it with what I could only assume was wizardry. (In reality, it was probably as simple as toggling a single setting that I had accidentally flipped.) Eventually, she would teach me how to troubleshoot issues myself, and the satisfaction of being able to solve a problem on my own was in part what got me into CS (Computer Science) myself.

Eventually Jaden’s interest in computers flourished into her starting a career in IT (Information Technology). Recently I took the time to sit down with her to have a chat about her experiences in the IT field. Jaden, 24, is currently right between jobs right now, about to start her very first day at a new company this Monday. Formerly a Systems Administrator at New Hampshire based digital marketing company Silvertech, she has decided to move into an Associate Consulting Engineer role at CDW, an Illinois-based worldwide provider of software, hardware, and IT services.

What careers did you want to pursue when you were younger?

Well, as you know, I used to use Gimp to edit photos when I was in middle school, at the time I was considering being a graphic designer. I had a brief period where I wanted to be a dermatologist as well, and as I got to college age I had wanted to be a software developer.

You started at UNH majoring in CS, how did you decide to major in that, and then what made you switch to IT?

I joined the CS program because I really enjoyed my Java programming class in high school. I decided to switch to IT because the CS/IT majors take a lot of the same classes during the first two years and I liked the IT classes much more than the CS classes. I gravitated towards computer networking and introductory web development and was bored by the topics covered in my programming classes. They can definitely be painfully boring.

Did you get along well with classmates? What can you say about the IT “crowd”?

I got along well with my classmates and found that the IT crowd is very “down to earth” and everyone is willing to help each other out. It didn’t feel ultra competitive like I’m sure other majors are.

No antisocial sweaty geeks?

Oh you know that those guys are inevitable. Few and far between, though. For the most part everyone was very outgoing.

What other job experiences have you had, what were the best and worst parts of those?

My first real IT job was as an Engineering Tools/IT Intern with BAE Systems [international defense, aerospace and security company.] My duties included remotely installing software for the Engineering team and creating software deployment packages so that colleagues could download their necessary software from a catalog if the software permitted it. I liked the job overall and got a feel for working at a large, international company. My least favorite aspect was that there was a good amount of downtime and as an intern, I had very restricted access to BAE’s systems so I often had to ask for additional work.

During my junior year of college, I worked as an IT helpdesk person for an Intellectual Property law firm called Finch & Maloney. The best part of the job was the freedom to tackle a larger variety of tasks — setting up new laptops, maintaining server backups, working on a new website for the company, maintaining Active Directory and Microsoft 365.

What has kept you going in every day, what’s the best thing about your job?

The best part of my job is that there is always something else to learn and something I can work on that will improve the company’s productivity — automating a process using scripting, creating documentation, researching new tools.

Is it difficult to keep up with the ever changing technology?

It can be, but that is more of a blessing in disguise in that a lot of the changes make our lives easier.

What does a typical day look like?

Handling tickets as they come in — requests from developers to restore databases/files between development environments, answering questions from colleagues about our hosting environment, patching and maintaining the hosting environment in Azure & AWS [Amazon Web Services], maintaining security certificates, spinning up new servers, or serverless architectures for upcoming client website launches.

Do you ever have to work with difficult people?

I think that’s one of the few guarantees, no matter what industry you work in. In general, expressing sympathy for the person’s situation — you know, stress, tight deadlines, that kind of thing — goes a long way when someone is being difficult.

What's the dumbest ticket you’ve ever received?

Oh gosh. Back when I was working at the internal IT helpdesk, we had someone reach out because her desktop wasn’t working and it had actually just been powered off. Brilliant.

Have you ever experienced challenges in the workplace, as a woman in a male dominated field?

Definitely, but never in a really overt way… I often wonder if clients question my credibility when they first interact with me on a conference call.

How important is company culture to you?

It is highly important to me and one of the main reasons I stayed with SilverTech for as long as I did. I think it’s great when you have a company composed of people who are passionate about what they do but don’t take themselves too seriously — there wasn’t anybody who was “off limits” when it came to friendly mockery or jokes. Everyone had a great attitude and tried to create a fun atmosphere.

Do you have a good work-life balance, is it easy to find time for hobbies?

This was one of the reasons I left my job at SilverTech — we have been understaffed in the hosting side of IT so it felt like I had to be available at the drop of a hat all of the time. That was a source of stress for me and will hopefully see an improvement at CDW.

You mentioned you’re moving to a new job very soon, tell me about that.

I decided to pursue this new career because I would like to shift to more project work and work directly with clients in a capacity that is more than the website pre-launch and launch meetings at the very end of the project. During the training process for the position with CDW, I will also receive certifications such as Security that I’d already been looking at getting but wasn’t able to pursue due to budget.

Where do you hope to see your career going? 

I see myself staying in more of a consulting role than traditional Systems Administrator. Maybe pursue becoming a manager in a few years.

[schematicsofhumanitas]

Armand the foreseer. Ch#1

<<We were less than a hundred back in the days. Our crew was considered numerous, however, for an extraterrestrial mission.

We were part of the 153 crew members assigned for the First international cooperative extraterrestrial exploration mission, ICEEM, and we had already established a sustainable independent base of operations in Europa, Jupiter's moon. It's an underwater base, as you may already know -whoever is reading this-, provided with the necessary survival sustainable micro-system to contain itself when isolated, and also to grow. It kept constant limited communication with Earth, or used to...

This mission has been my life. And me, among other 26 original crew members today, are the only ones left in this moon, that were born on Earth. This is, because the mission was an all out mission, a complete bet on humanity's decision to widespread throughout the solar system. We, the ones in the crew, were among the few professionals on Earth that were willing to travel in a spaceship for 16 years and establish the first extraterrestrial soon-to-be human colony. We had done 2 trips already, and I was in both of them. I've been living in space for more than 32 years, and hell do I not regret it now.

Both trips had different missions, and they were fulfilled with 100% success. Logically, permanent and multiple trips had been scheduled once confirmed the colony's stability and once the required population was registered. Also, commercial permanent moving trips for non-professional crew members were planned in the next 25 years.

This has been an ice bucket. Humanity has had to adopt very rudimentary political systems in order to make very small colonizing societies functional. We are different from the people of Earth. We think differently and feel differently. I can't explain how frustrating it is to see how much so many value the Earth and its surface, overlapping what should be humanity's true interest: an insurance of our survival: interplanetary colonization.

This is the very reason we had been such a happy crew. Our view of the universe had a very different color and texture from the ones on Earth, to the extent of deciding to survive around an infinite void of nothingness for 16 years, isolated from almost everything we knew, submitting ourselves to a deliberate, yet Earth controlled colonizing mission.

We weren't allowed to have kids while on the trip, and after the second trip, we would brng new crew members to fulfill the colony objective. Young crew members from all races, 18 years old, who would be parents from its 34 years old. Naturally, Europa's demographics are very uncommon for Earth's standards. Today, there isn't anyone in the colony between the ages of 20 and 56, due to that particular phenomenon. There are all kinds of fully prepared professionals, most of the crew members had to undergo a lengthy process of tests, assuring prosperity for the mission. All was prepared beforehand. It was a multi-state/multi-national joint megaproject. Therefore, the second trip would assure growth -and it did so far- independent from Earth.

The third trip brought as well the necessary crew to implement all the basic elements a civilized community needs: political system, economics, urban planning, education, language, engineering, and biodiversity. Everything had been going perfectly. Life was a success in Europa, until...

Until that day came. The day in which we were waiting for feedback and we didn't receive it. The day we were left alone, forever.

The second's trip returning assigned crew had already departed to Earth. Jim Barton, Olivia Déroule, and Mikel Vasilik were the crew administrators. 5 Earth months had already passed and constant communications had been kept with them. As for Earth's communications, we feedback everyday, every 5 hours. We had never had any problems with the rutinary feed information logs transmitted daily. However, one day we stopped receiving data.

A message from Earth to Europa (and viceversa) takes between two to four hours, depending on the Solar System current overall status. Video, audio and text take aroung the same amount of time. We first thought of any error, problem, miscalculation… anything that may have arisen in the operating systems and telecommunications, but nothing. Every time our operatives requested the system to check on any update, the same damn message appeared:

        "No Data"

Still to this day, on mi 89 years I've been alive, I had never felt so much fear and anxiety. I can't see that message anymore. I don't want to see it anymore. We've been here 20 years already, and there's nothing else I am waiting for, now. Maybe I will die without knowing what really happened.

Jim and the crew were equipped with transmission as well, logically. They had noticed minutes earlier and reported to us. They were frightened: that trip was meant to return to Earth and did not have the necessary means to slow down and return to Europa. In fact, they were ten times more frightened, maybe. Imagine going on a boat through an absurdly fast river and suddenly the lighthouse's light (the destination) fades, and all you see is darkness as you are traveling at millions of kilometers per hour, not being able to go back and with the only possibility of hitting the shores without knowing who (or what) is there.

Weeks passed, and no messages received. Tim's crew was composed of many of my dearest friends, as well as part of the 2nd trip's members. Even though most were old fashioned audio transmissions at the moment we knew about our isolation, I could already see their faces, their eyes… I'm sure, however, that they had no space left in their minds or hearts to imagine ours.

We were taught on NASA and the other institutes that these moments might happen, and we were psychologically trained to withstand it. However, that's bullshit at this point. We were alone and scared, and nobody could decypher what was really, happening. As time went by, our only hope was our crew telling us Earth's true events and fate at their arrival. They would have been fifteen and a half years delayed from whatever happened that day.

So at some point, we could forget about the fear and talk about the anxiety and, amid the situation, the unavoidable, thrilling unwanted excitement. In this era, our colony jokes about it: as we grew older, we started to consider it part of our destiny as humans. It was a fact taken for granted that humanity's real course may have been to explore the universe and move from planet to planet, or moons, leaving part of its civilization behind, and who knows, maybe in some years we would migrate again to yet another place with the hope to widespread our species, and someday get out of the solar system.

There were other transmissions from Earth. Entertainment, news, sports, all over a limited and expensive communication channel that gave access to Earth's world wide web servers. Naturally, transmissions were bilateral, and a live transmission of our colony with due latency was transmitted to Earth at all times. We used to podcast with our travelers -Jim's crew- every hour. As time went by, it became part of the routine, like a ritual. We needed them and their news, and they needed us more than anything else. Every time any anomaly or interesting event happened, it used to be transmitted to the crew and viceversa. One time, an asteroid from which we had no data passed some hundred miles next to our crew. This resulted in a very alarming situation: the asteroid database had been incomplete; for some reason it hadn't been updated. Tim said in the call: "heck, had we known this would happen some hours before, we'd have prepared a footage from the left side: it looked enormous from there guys". Useful information was being exchanged, in general terms, and although that information would have driven us nowhere, it was the shady reminder of the unavoidable, the event that would change humanity's destiny once again.

Our love story ended 4 years ago. We have never heard from them again, ever. Tim's last words were the following:

"Message 43.043AF: we are at roughly 38 hours away from the exosphere. We do not see artificial human light I repeat: we can't see artificial lights on the dark side. Approaching Earth's field. There's no-".

That day is remembered as the memorial day for our crew. We don't and can't know what's going on, and we will have to live with it. This is Armand Walton, Europa's autonomous Republic first commander. May our life course continue despite the obstacles we've had as a civilization so far.>>

She then closed the file and looked at his face. - Do you see it better now? -She asked. He did not reply. He stood there, looking at a void his sight had invented, and thought for a minute or two. In fact, he wasn't thinking of anything at all. He was just in shock after having heard the very words of the first Europan Commander. Words that were prohibited. -Why didn't he write more logs after that? -He asked her. Gilbert, nobody knows. You know nobody knows. -But isn't there any way to find some hidden data on the servers?

He insisted: he was too young to consider the reality of Armand City and the whole planet. He was a 14 year old dreamer starting to question the matters of life, and eventually bursts of existentialism, and fights between nihilism and meaning came to him like thunderbolts. It used to happen a lot to teenagers: they would ask themselves the reasons behind apparently obvious facts, questions arised through observation and glimpses of deep reasoning. However, after having to face the daily routines, comply with the duties related to the educational system -school-, and feeling the first <<cupid shots>> in their lives, they would unconsciously surrender to the everyday, the mundane and the obvious, and leave in second plane the ever un-answered questions that everybody once has.

-We have tried everything for centuries, Gilbert. We have even extended our range and improved by ten times the receptivity, and yet nothing. You may understand this on a later age. She logged out. One more minute could have been lethal: somebody would have discovered the break-in. She had done it previous times, however not because of her curiosity. She was a very different being.

Gilbert was still a kid and his strong innocence was dragging him down on the matters he deeply cared for. The dark but pragmatic calculations inspectors and detectives are able to make: the conclusions and assumptions one can do once being an adult, result of the livings in life and the dissappointments, the ups and downs we have been through, or just innate insight of events around us. Humans can be human until they're deceived, beaten or defeated, laughed at. Until they see a dark monster inside their heads that sometimes may go berserk, sometimes lies down and one is able to control it, and sometimes we may even ignore the beast. Until then, they become either "evil" or "heroes" if they take care of that beast, or losers, if they ignore it.

Amelia, his sister, was older than him. She was 22 and had a lot of responsibilities. An operating system engineer assigned to do a lot of duties related to autotomize the metaserver, among other talents. A true skilled worker. Smart, of course, and had too many traits for Gilbert. At least that was his perception from her. What he felt wasn't jealousy though: she was a model for him in a lot of aspects. Questioned the authorities a lot of times to protect themselves or friends, had helped him in school twice, gave him advice about a girl Gilbert used to like, and used to aid him when he didn't know how to tie his shoelaces. A true example of excellence. She had done a great job as older sister. With busy parents, she used to take care of most of Gilbert's needs when he was little.

Gilbert didn't want to ask that question only. He had more from where the first one surged, but he didn't dare to ask. For some reason, he had the feeling that his older sister wouldn't have been able to tell him what's the most likely scenario of what had happened on Earth, nor what was the word around by the era of the elders, and why haven't we, the Europans, after centuries, tried a new trip even after so long: 400 years: a time in which we have the technology to come and go without Earth's feedback. Was it too hard to arrange that trip? he thought about it over and over again.

-Is it too hard? to arrange a trip to Earth? -He asked, because he could not have been able to retain it for longer, and he thought it to be the perfect timing.

Once again with the classic rhetoric that wouldn't last much longer, Amelia referred to the matter as something too complex for him to fully understand.

-Stop it, please, I'm fourteen, I'm capable to know! -He almost yelled. Contained himself because of his respect towards her. -Gilbert, there are a lot of things not known to us. When I work, I try my best to make this a better place so that we can one day answer the difficult questions. Now let's go.

<<To be Continued>>