williamhathaway.com

Clio and I made it to San Jose yesterday afternoon.  We are staying in a furnished short term lease apartment while we figure out where we will want to live in the long run. The location is excellent. After living in the suburbs for the last 10 years, it kind of odd that within two blocks of our place there is a big library, a grocery store, movies, and many restaurants and shops.

Our trip out west is got a slow start due to the crazy snowstorm that hit the mid-east, but as of Sunday night we managed to make it to Lincoln, Nebraska.  Hopefully we will reach San Jose on Wednesday.

Moving container being delivered

Lots of things are coming together in the final countdown before the move to San Jose.

Last week I had three nice send off dinners from various groups of people and met with Realtors. On Sunday, a bunch of Clio’s friends came over and as the night was winding down, we gave away the vast majority of our furniture.    It was a great feeling knowing that our furniture would be helpful to other people as well as the fact that we now didn’t need to deal with the expense of moving it across the country.

Today the moving containers we will be packing our remaining possessions into arrived.  The containers were on a flat-bed truck and the driver used a really neat looking 3-wheeled forklift to carry the containers about 100 yards from the truck to our driveway.

Walking around our now mostly empty house has brought home the reality of the move.  I’m really going to miss hanging out with the friends I made in central PA, but I am also anxious to see what the next chapter of my life brings.

After a frustrating 15 months or so of very sporadic running,  I’m happy to report that I’ve been able to run fairly consistently for the last 3 months.  I am still getting some annoying BFS based symptoms, but it seems like I am trending towards getting better.  I also had a EMG in December to help make sure there was nothing else amiss (I had been given a misdiagnosis of muscular dystrophy from a neurologist in early 2009, which really scared me).

For the last 3 weeks I’ve been averaging 30 miles a week and would like to run in the Garden Spot Village Marathon on April 10th with Nate.   My certainty level about the race isn’t too high due to the impending California move and lack of clarity about my work/travel schedule.  If I can’t make that race for some reason, I’ll try to keep my mileage consistent and then look for a marathon more local to San Jose.

I’m definitely not in prime shape yet, but at this point, I am thrilled to be running again on a regular basis.

My wife and I have decided to move to the San Francisco/SiliconValley area.  We haven’t set a date yet,  but we are definitely moving sometime in 2010.

I just saw a post from Bill Krazter about searching for his first post on usenet.  This got me thinking about my activities and I google stalked the resume I sent out on misc.jobs.resumes on June 9th 1995.

Kind of interesting to look back at how I thought of myself 14 years ago.  The text formatting got a little dorked up in the translation.

Hi,
I've just gotten a Bachelor's degree in Computer Information Science,
and am looking for employment as a programmer or assistant sysadmin
in a UNIX shop.  I have very good C skills, have done a pretty fair
amount of "lower-level" unix coding for both the computer services dept
at Kutztown, and for my personal use (i.e. wrote a finger utility when we
switched OS's, and Dynix's finger was broken, wrote a user watch program
that notified me when friends logged onto any of the networked machines
here, and a process reaper to help kill runaway programs).  I'm a quick
learner and always enjoy exploring new areas. I have good verbal/written
communication skills, enjoy beating expectations, and am a team player.
I'd prefer a dress-down environment, and to work in the Philadelphia/Princeton
area.   If it sounds like I might be a decent match for your business,
please get in touch.  Thanks for your time.
-Bill
hathXXXX@kutztown.edu
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
++
William D. Hathaway
4XXX George School
Newtown, PA 18940
215/860-XXXX
OBJECTIVE   An entry level position as a system adminstrator/programmer.
EDUCATION   Kutztown University, Kutztown Pennsylvania
Bachelor of Science in Computer Information Science
Concentration: Business
GPA: 3.34/4.00
May 1995
COMPUTER
KNOWLEDGE   Operating Systems: UNIX (SunOS/Solaris,Dynix,OSF/1,Linux),
MSDOS,MacOS,Windows
Languages        : C,C++,Ada,pascal,COBOL,80x86 assembler,
perl,shell scripts,lex,yacc
Programmed in C since September 1992.
Extensive working with UNIX since January 1992.
Adminstered own Linux machine since February 1993.
RELEVANT
COURSES     Internetwork Programming (independent study)
Data Communications          File Structures
Compiler Design              Algorithm Analysis
EXPERIENCE  Student Programmer/Consultant September 1993 - May 1995
Kutztown University Computer Services, Kutztown PA.
* helped network adminstrator pinpoint/fix problems
* individualized tutoring about UNIX/internet
* wrote various utility programs
ACTIVITIES  Lacrosse Team
Kutztown University Computer Association
REFERENCES  Available upon request

Nagano on the day we adopted him

My wife and I adopted a new cat named Nagano on October 14th from a shelter in Lancaster, PA.  We found out after we adopted him that he had gone from 11 lbs to 9lbs while at the shelter, not a good sign.  For the first few days he seemed okay, but then his health started to decline.  Over the last 7 weeks we’ve given him as much love as we could, taken him to the vet 7 or 8 times, gotten many tests, two fluid infusions, several  types of anti-biotics (one he was allergic to and we had to switch quickly) and a few types of food, but he kept running fevers, losing weight and almost all energy.  He was barely moving in the last few days.  After agonizing over  his deteriorating condition with my wife this morning, I made an emergency vet appointment and took Nagano in again.  We had a FIP test taken earlier in the week and unfortunately the test results had come back last night as positive, which essentially means “systemic infection” and could also be contagious to our other two cats.  The vet said we could keep him alive longer with fluid infusions, but he was not going to recover and his quality of life was rapidly declining so we made the decision to euthanize him.  I feel like it was the right decision and I’m happy Nagano isn’t suffering any more, but the whole experience just sucked.

Monday morning through Sunday night I worked 91.5 hours, which was my heaviest work week ever.  The team I am on was in a big sprint to get Sun’s DSEE software rolled out on a huge scale across multiple data centers and it all came together.   The software installation and configuration itself was easy to manage across dozens of hosts thanks to the fantastic CLI.   The x4600 servers performed very well.  Our biggest challenges were coordinating a group of people in multiple locations with differing levels of familiarity of the machines and software stack.  There were a few cases where tired fingers made a typo and wiped out some data, but using zfs rollback (and smart use of snapshots) made the recovery time in under a minute once the problem was detected.

The funniest moment of the crazy weekend was when my wife saw me working in my office at 8am Sunday morning and asked what time I went to bed.  I answered “about 6:30″.  The look of horror on her face as she realized that mean less than 1.5 hours of sleep was awesome.

I hope I don’t have craziness like the last week often, but I did feel a great sense of accomplishment when we were done.

Tip of the day:

If you get a coredump on Solaris, run

echo ‘$C’ | mdb $name_of_corefile

to get the stacktrace that actually caused the core.

I just went for a bike ride at the Conewago trail and I think I dropped my iPod  in the parking lot while wrestling my bike into the back of my car.  If you happen to be a kind person who found my iPod and are googling ‘William Hathaway 10 years @ Versatile’ to figure out who owns it, please contact me at bill.hathaway@gmail.com or 717-314-461. I’ll be happy to give a cash reward or a donation to charity.  Thanks!

My wife pointed me towards Modest Needs, a “mini grant” charity designed to help people who are generally self-sufficient  but encounter one-time needs that might be pushing them towards poverty or preventing them from taking a job.   An example might be someone who is generally able to pay rent but had to miss two weeks of work due to an injury or something else beyond their control or who have a job offer in-hand but need to renew some professional license before starting work (like a nurse).

Modest Needs makes all applicants submit paperwork electronically and contacts the employers/landlords/merchants directly to verify the situation and disburse funding directly to the creditor if the grant is approved.  If you donate money to Modest Needs, you can pick which individual applications you want to help fund.

If you are feeling in a generous mood, check it out: Modest Needs.

Here is their rating on Charity Navigator.