Anson the Gnome

Clearly I haven't done a very good job of blogging lately. I'll chalk that up to putting a lot of effort into finding another project to work on.

Today, I started a new job at BioWare, as an Infrastructure Engineer. It's not a glamorous job - I'm working on the tools and systems that keep the more game-specific teams agile - but as I've said a few times, there's a lot to get right when you're making, launching, and operating a successful MMOG.

That's pretty much what I want to do right now, with Dungeon Runners about to close and my last project never seeing the light of day. I'm in this industry to make people happy, and I'm working on MMOGs in particular because they can reach such a broad audience for so long. I've had some trouble actually making that happen, but I think BioWare can do it - that's a horse I want to hitch my wagon to.

The data center my web server resides in moved recently; I - and everyone I share my rack with - had to move our equipment some time between the beginning and end of this month. So that happened today, and I'm sorry for the downtime (to anyone that noticed) but it's stuff like this that, honestly, keeps me wanting to run my own server.

I remember once at NCsoft something similar happened; I don't remember (and may not have ever known) the "why" but data centers changed; I just noticed because... wow, all those sysadmins and network admins and other operational staff sure seemed tired and cranky. But as I recall, it didn't actually translate to significant game down time - certainly not the 8 or so hours this site had today (to be clear, everything in the rack was being moved at once - I didn't do such a terrible job that it took me 8 hours to move one 2U system across town).

That's something I should keep in mind, in my opinion. Can the systems I develop be easily migrated if they have to be? Not just for the (generally rare) circumstance of the entire data center moving, or contracts changing, but even the day-to-day of machine failure.

At nearly midnight, having been home for about 15 minutes, I'm certainly not of the right mindset to make a list of proper steps or describe an architecture or any such thing; but I can at least try to remember this feeling later, because I don't really wish it on anyone. :-)

Scott already has the best picture of the vulture stalking us. We've seen him outside the office a couple of times, but this time it seemed like he really wanted us to know he was there.

I've been a very busy bee, but now I'm back from PAX and relaxing a little bit. Feeling pretty good. :-) I'll have more to say later...

Yes, I was laid off today. Lots of stuff going on, but mostly things about which I should or would rather not say. I'm planning on renaming the journal, to cut out 'nc,' but I'm still trying to decide on the new name ('anson' is already taken).