I was just thinking about socially annoying people that are given a pass because they actually accomplish good things in the software community. “Sure, he’s a PITA, but he gets shit done.” I wonder if that’s something that mostly not socially inept people think and say.

A couple kids from the house and I saw Be Kind Rewind. It was good, a little different than what I expected, but funny. Anthony hung out at the office today and watched Wizard People Dear Reader while waiting for a >2TB ext3 partition to format (omg). That was pretty humorous, MST3k + Harry Potter.

Couple things on my mind as of late. I recently emailed Maria, “what makes the trend of egomaniacs thinking their nice people? what’s the cause? upbringing? jesus loves you?”. There’s some back story and jokes in the wording of that questions that are probably left off the dump truck. Anthony and I were talking today about people whose personalities change when they get fame (or too many friends) or money, and don’t seem to look back. I suppose it’s a common tale, I feel like it’s a movie plot I’ve seen dozens of times. I feel like I’ve written recently about confidence and arrogance, but all I can find quickly is a rant after watching Into the wild, and some okcupid inspired bits about being surprised at the number of of power hungry people out there in search of fast cars and fast [wo]men.

I have this pet peeve when it comes to people that never say “I’m not sure”, “I don’t think thats right”, etc. I know I’ve written about it and talk about it to the degree that makes it obvious it bothers me. The only people I ever take seriously when offering information are people that I’ve deemed of the caliber that can say these things. The rest of them I almost ritualistically ignore, and then search on the Internet instead later. The problem is that blogs aside, the Internet has these opinions with no framework with which to judge the sanity of the person providing them. I prefer opinions of people, because I usually know those people. Someone who always has an answer and masquerades such opinions as facts is just troubling.

I feel like that’s a sort of arrogance. I have this balancing thought of “Of the 230492293049203942 people in this world, am I the one genius?” Of course the answer is no. It’s not a ‘cry for attention’ or anything, it’s not a thought I ever talk about. Except, well, right now. It’s my way of trying to make sure I’m not being overly arrogant. I think it works alright.

As time goes on, I realize more and more that most people aren’t as cool as society raised me to think they were supposed to be. Not that I ever was convinced that they were cool, but that on the whole I should have no part of interacting with them. There’s this whole stereotype that you’re supposed to look back and see that the cool kids mostly didn’t do anything with their lives. That’s probably true, because I know I do a lot of things simply because they seem fun at the time and don’t get caught up in a lot of the traps that seem to have held down people from my teenage years. All the same though, other peoples lives are not an indicator of my success. Indicators of my success are things like getting the engine running in the surbuban, despite being wholly trounced by already having to rebuild the front clip, including frame welding. Or technical projects like massaging a pile of open source software into a system to make my days easier, like RT.

I haven’t worked on large bandwidth networks much. That is, a large website like Amazon or whatnot. There’s this whisper about F5 BIG-IPs being a big deal in large website land. We have a few at my new job, and I’ve had to mess with them a few times. They’re not all that big of a deal. Now maybe the product is special and handle load balancing better than other things, but from a sysadmin perspective, it’s just some other normal piece of gear. It’s nice I can ssh into it and use tcpdump and whatnot to see what’s going on, but I miss the part where one really needs a lot of special training to configure them. It seems like it would be like the Breezecom/Alvarion training I had, totally corporate training for people who don’t make a hobby of reading network design books on their own time.

Hmm. That paragraph was intended to have something to do with my confidence, and knowing that I am a capable, decent, intelligent type person. Too many distractions I think, I’m off to pick up a take out order now anyways.