Safety valve, approach one:

• 3 oz lime juice
• 2 oz grapefruit juice
• 2 oz falernum
• 2 oz simple syrup
• 5 oz captain morgan's private stock
• 4 oz bacardi 151
• 4 oz myers legend (or myers dark) rum
• 4 oz appleton estate rum
• 4 oz flor de cana grand reserve rum
• 3 oz maraschino liquer (cherry Pucker works fine)
• 8 dashes pernod
• 4 dashes angostura bitters
• 12 dashes grenadine

Store in 36-ounce (1L) container in freezer overnight. Pour over crushed (1 cm^3) ice into a pint glass nightly after work, followed by another if necessary. Do not exceed two doses in a single evening. Storing in the freezer is essential to maintain consistency. A thicker consistency is much more pleasant. Depending upon amount of ice used (more is better), recipe provides 4-7 doses (eg, enough for a week).

It is important that consumption occur in the company of loved one(s), and that discussion of work, nor performance of work occur.

comments welcome

mirwin, this saddens me. I cannot see the value in a forked wikipedia.

In other news, my safety valve is almost ready for release.

Back during my defense work days, we got to the point where I was having three hammerheads (two shots of espresso in a cup of coffee) a day, drinking too much at night, taking a mild steroid to overcome the hangovers, and various opioids for the migraines and back pain that comes from doing work in datacenters (great environment for machines, not so good for people).

I made the decision that it wasn't healthy. I was getting sick a lot.

I'm getting back to that point again. Not quite there, but I'm not sleeping well, and the infighting and backbiting at work seems to be coming to a head. Even before leaving AOL, the stress was building up due to the team being short-staffed, and some "complex relationship problems" with my boss.

When I spoke to my doctor about getting into that rut again, he told me that I had to get out of the industry. That he has a lot of patients who come see him for 3 months supply of Ambien, Xanax, antidepressants every 3 months. It destroys them. Programmers, sysadmins, IT managers, everyone.

Why does our field do this to us?

I'm working on my solution. I'll keep you posted.

Solaris, solaris, solaris!

Boy, I have gotten rusty on my Solaris skills. Been doing a lot of lvm. I guess I had just gotten used to the linux lvm, which at the time, was suitably different from solaris lvm that I guess I wound up forgetting everything.

I'm not really sure how you'd set up an lvm mirror of your root disk in linux, and then subsequently boot off it. I know how I'd go and create a logical (mirrored) volume that looks just like root, but I suspect I couldn't boot off it. In solaris, we do:

metadb -af [whatever]
metainit -f d11 1 1 c1t0d0s0
metainit -f d12 1 1 c1t1d0s0
metainit d1 -m d11
metaroot d1
lockfs -fa
reboot
metattach d1 d12

where c1t0d0s0 is of course root and c1t1d0s0 is the mirror.

That, to me doesn't look particularly intuitive. I'm much happier with the vgcreate/pvcreate/lvcreate/e2fsadm approach. However, Sun's meta* commands have been around a lot longer, and I think there's been a sort of "lvm renaissance" since Sun started doing it. I'm anxious to see the Solaris 10 approach. In their defense, the sccli commands are somewhat more intuitive.

Lesson learned: if I don't keep my skills sharp (eg spend a year in a linux shop), they wither. I should probably avoid doing this in the future. On the other hand, having big piles of hardware in my living room sucked a whole lot.

So I was one of the 800 or so people laid off by AOL. I can say this now because people like Bill DeStevens can't, er, "discipline" me again. I am contractually prohibited from making any "disparaging" remarks about AOL, so I will stop before saying anything else.

I will say, however, that I start work tomorrow, and would have started on Monday, had I not been arguing with them over the details of the offer. What this means is I get two months severance for leaving a [adjectives deleted] job and starting another. Ahem. Free Money.

Before I started AOL, I was a contractor. I didn't have any particular allegiance to the company I was with. I didn't believe that the company had any good intentions in mind for me. AOL almost changed my mind of that. It was fun, it was exciting, and I enjoyed it, while it lasted.

Back to bein' a beltway bandit. Switching from Linux back to Solaris, switching from Intel back to UltraSparc. I'll probably be making some Opteron recommendations for our smaller hardware, but I think right now, I'll just go back to the comfortable groove I was in before I became another Running Man.

My apologies to those of my coworkers who did not find a job as quickly as I did. A word to those still looking: mid-career, skilled people can earn as much as $60/hr in the metro dc area as programmers and sysadmins. Don't settle for $30 unless you have to.