Disclaimer: this is the story as I remember it. very likely to be incomplete and/or incorrect, but a story nonetheless. Leave comments for corrections. oh, and tell me when i should stop.

So, the summer of ‘99 was fast approaching and things were looking up for the CCS IT Deptartment. In a mere week, we had doubled our size from one to two. Between the John and I, we could pretty much handle all the programming and infrastructure needs to keep the ship on an even keel, but John was never the kind to keep the status quo. We needed more (get used to this phrase).

I don’t know if it was John’s disdain for AcIS or their incompetence, but it was clear that we were moving in a different direction than what any of the other technology group on campus wanted to go. In order to continue, we’d need our own servers. Enter Eeyore.

Eeyore was the bees knees back in the day. A dual proc PIII 500 MHz Dell box with half a gig of ram . . . ! Getting him was actually a difficult task as John had ordered him with Linux installed by the factory. It ended up taking a few more weeks for the dell kids to figure out how to get it right, but by early spring we had our first server running RedHat 5.2, kicking up a storm in the corner of the office.

More important than hardware, we needed a new Tawana, because the lord knew that one thing John wasn’t was a designer. Enter Helen Chu.

I wasn’t there when she interviewed, but i remember walking into the office one day and John telling me, “We have a new Tawana.” To be honest, the magnitude of the moment was lost on me. Even my first encounter with Helen was a bit subdued. I attribute this to that awkward acclimation period of starting a new job. Or maybe I just didn’t know how to recognize wonderful people until I met Helen. Anyway, one thing I was in the office for was Helen’s first account on eeyore. weeee.

So, now there was John, Helen, me and eeyore, but we still needed more. Specifically, we needed more of that secret special sauce known as intern labor. This was easily remedied by a call out for resumes (we were working for the center for career services, after all), and a few interviews later, we had our first intern corps: Rob Esris, Leslie Hsiung, and myself. For that summer, Rob was to write a web poll program in c++ whose project name I’ve forgotten, Leslie was our web intern. You all remember those animated, cartoon lions that used to crawl all over our sites? Yeah. leslie. hand drawn. And myself? I was purposed for more MadSearch love.

And so we had a captain, a web mistress, three interns, and a server. Lots of damage could have been wrought with that combination, except we were missing actual computers to work on. Not a problem. One phone call to our favorite hardware provider and a couple weeks later, we said hello to pooh, kanga, roo, piglet and tigger. The Orginals. These bad boys weren’t pizza boxes sitting in a rack. They were dual boot windows 98/linux boxen installed by John himself(!) with 19″ crt montiors (19 inches! the good stuff!). yeah . . . those were the good days when JLG had not yet been swallowed up by redmond dogma. If i remember correctly, John took pooh, helen got kanga, i worked off of tigger . . . i want to say leslie had piglet and rob sat on roo. Anyway, significant as this was my first encounter with the penguin, learning to ssh and not telnet, playing with system administration, and finding my window manager of choice, WindowMaker. yum.

As I’m writing this, I’m suddenly realizing how crucial a period of time this was for us. And, although i keep using the pronouns of “us” and “we,” it really was john driving all of this change.  Well, as unleashed John since, in addition to Tawana leaving, the CCS Director had also left.  Yeah, as the selfishcrab has observed, turnover is quite high in the Lions’ halls. But there’s this chinese saying that the new can’t come until the old has left and the Director’s vacancy opened the window for another significant event, a need to appoint an interim Director. That lucky interim Director was Sue Mescher.

Disclaimer: this is the story as I remember it. very likely to be incomplete and/or incorrect, but a story nonetheless. Leave comments for corrections. oh, and tell me when i should stop.

So, I met JLG in the fall of 1998, my sophomore year. I had just retired from rowing, and for the first time in five years, i didn’t have anything to define me. No more morning and evening work outs. No more racing season. No more team for which to fight. All the things that I loved at that time–the competition, the water, the comraderie–were gone. I was listless to say the least. However, more important that my listlessness was my peasantry. And so, on the advice of a fraternity brother, i walked into the Center for Career Services looking for a job.

If the credits in this story were to roll in order of appearance, Pat Macken’s name would show up first. A cameo in this film, but pivitol nonetheless. She was the one who greeted me at CCS, asked me what i was looking for, and then walked me upstairs to meet Tawana. At the time, i had a familiarity with computers. Back then I could actually navigate my way around a Windows98 box, and what little html i knew i had learned in Gateway. Tawana asked me a few questions which i no longer remember and a few minutes later i was in the employ of CCS.

The job wasn’t that hard. I ran around trouble shooting the staff’s computer troubles, maintaining the public workstations, and kicking the Jake printers every now and then. When i wasn’t running around, I’d be up in the office fixing various web pages across the CCS site.

At the time, the IT office was right outside the CCS Director’s office. In one corner, there was a large desk that took up one quadrant of the room and along the remaining two walls of the office were wall-facing desks with about four workstations all together.

Since Tawana had hired me, i assumed the big desk was hers. But it wasn’t. As it turned out I sat next to her at one of the smaller workstation desks along with the other work study kids, nithia and velma. The big desk belonged to John. I think JLG was a spritely 23 years of age back then. Our introduction was brief. Nothing more than a handshake and a curt hello before he put his headphones on and buried himself behind his monitor–a bit ironic that six years later he’d draw a portrait of me in a similar position. I’d later learn that JLG had confessed his dislike for me. a “yahoo”, he said i was.
As the year progressed, I started growing on hime, or at least i thought. He started me off with some javascript programming and eventually moved me into application development work. The tool of the hour back then was MadSearch2 the sequel to the wildly successful MadSearch. It was actually pretty slick for it’s day. A fully integrated template and datastore development kit. Back then there was no php, and perl or c++ cgi development was a bit of a bear since we worked off of AcIS servers and they didn’t support it. So, MadSearch2 it was. JLG had also given birth to Madness–our in house version of Monster/JobTrak which at the time were still two separate companies each courting us to switch over–which was some combination of MadSearch2, C++ and Paradox macros, i want to say. It was a pretty comprehensive system and coordinated a whole bunch of stuff that i still don’t know about.

Being the young’n, i didn’t get to play with Madness. Instead, i was put on smaller projects like the library resources database (the longest living project in our history!), and what i’d call calendar v0.0.0.0.1 which was more like a cms tool to allow staff members to program events onto the website.

And so for a while, things were good. Building these apps was a lot of fun, the work environment was great, I was learning a lot. But, all good things come to and end and john walked in one day and announced that he was leaving to work for AcIS. Actually, he didn’t tell me directly. I heard it through the grapevine. Which was fine and dandy and all. It wasn’t that consequential for me as I’d only been working there for a couple of months. Besides, as time passed I would come to learn that this wouldn’t be the only time JLG gave me the ditch.

So, we had a party for John. People were crying. I was eating cake. And, after a few weeks, things had calmed down. At least until Tawana announced that she was leaving. Now, this announcement had some repercussions for me. All of a sudden I found myself alone at the top of the CCS IT mountain. Well, actually, at this point, it wasn’t exactly a mountain. It was just me, and if you ever get a copy of my old resume, you’ll see the description of this time as follows:

During critical period, assumed the responsibilities of Director of Information Technology, Center for Career Services.

There it was. The peak of my career.

Granted, it’s nice to have on a resume and it was also nice to get the big desk in the room. But, i was only a sophomore in college and pretty much in over my head. My daily tasks began to center exclusively on fixing boxen and assuring people that you can’t replace the lightbulb in a computer monitor.

Luckily, after a few months, John saw the error in his move to AcIS and returned to reclaim his throne. In the end, i guess i have to thank him for his brief absence, since, during his time away, CCS was desperate to keep me onboard. And so, with desperation and one of James Mbote’s uncanny typos, i happily acquiesced the IT throne in return for a $12 and hour summer internship with paid housing.

I’ve offically hit a new peak in daily traffic on the old attack-gecko.net, far surpassing the previous one day high.  I’d reveal the numbers, but, that would be all to embarrassing. anyway, considering the huge interest in the subject of C, C, I and T, what say you all to an entry in Wikipedia?

Go forth and contribute!

So, in honor of John’s departure, i’ve been typing up the story of ccit and me as a little stroll down memory lane type of thing. since i am an audience whore, i’ll leave it to y’all if you want me to put it up here. it’ll probably be over many long installments.

leave a comment with a yay or nay.

And so a decade long era has come to an end–spiritually as of now, technically in a few weeks. The Captain has called it quits.

I have to say I’m really happy for him. Deep down, i’d always thought he’d leave before me. The plan was to stick around for a year after his departure, wrap things up and transition to a new regime. It was to echo the story of my life. But, plans change, and I’m glad my abandonment didn’t last too long.

I hope he finds in his new work what had been swallowed up by those rendered inordinately obstinate by indulgence.

Not like you haven’t heard it before, but Good luck and Godspeed, JLG.

. . . .

It looks like jeng has run into a bit of blogger’s block. in honor of him, i too will juxtapose my first and more recent posts.

First post . . . !

August 31, 2002

oh, boy. how much has this week sucked? first, i end up working until 5am on monday, 1am on tuesday. was able to take a quick break for dinner with friends on wednesday before I went right back to work. On thursday, I find that my site was launched to 10 classes without my knowledge and I spent the whole day answering emails. Actually, that’s not true. I took about 30 mins off to have a conversation with the others about our use of Wind and how it was against policy. Their suggestion? write an apache module to work with it. Right. like i have the f*&^ing time to write an apache module. And today? well, today we were supposed to launch calendar. guess what? didn’t happen. in fact, i should e-mail john about it. hold on . . . alrighty, e-mail taken care of. oh one more thing that sucked today, I went to register for classes at 3:30 today only to find out that the registration office closed at 3. WTF!!! I worked until 9:30pm tonight. freaking wusses.

I think the only upshots for the week are 1) John and Lydia are back which means that I get to start having a social life again. and 2) I went sake drinking tonight.

I’m sick of this stinkpad. i want ninjageck

more recent post:

every time you hear the rolling thunder . . .
you turn around before the . . . oh wait, that’s physically impossible.

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fret no, young jeng. with the peaks come the valleys.