Boss Sacking

I’m very conflicted.  Today, the man I’ve worked for for over 8 years got sacked.  I don’t really intend this to be a deeply reflective post, mainly one to document this point in time, and how I feel.  I think he was a fall-guy, a victim of circumstance, but yet, I think he totally had the power to prevent what happened to him.  Our whole company is completely addicted to change, from the top to the bottom.  Nobody prioritizes today’s activities, at least, I don’t see anyone prioritizing what’s happening today over anything that is coming up in the future.  We’re always focused on tomorrow.  I work in Operations, I have no choice but to worry about today at the expense of tomorrow, but it seems higher up we could have spent more time focusing on how what we were doing was going to affect our operations.  At the very least, as we dipped below 99%, then 98%, then 97% availability, we could have put a focus back on it and had all hands on deck to alleviate the problems.  We did try to do that, but I think it was too late.  Ultimately, most CIOs don’t make it through a Billing Conversion, so a credit to him that he did and last 6 months past it, but all in all, I think he was an excellent boss who was the fall guy for the business to blame when things went exactly as anyone could have seen them going given their total lack of direction.

No Netflix? No problem!

At work, they block Netflix streaming for obvious reasons.  However, they don’t block outbound TCP connections on every port, which is the only way you can stop me from looking at what I want.  I have a Linode VPS that I use for a screen’d copy of irssi which connects to Undernet and bitlbee for IM (I’ll do a post on that sometime).  I have a script that keeps that connection nailed up that looks like:

until ssh -t -o "ServerAliveInterval 1" -o "ServerAliveCountMax 5" -D 1080 -R 8000:localhost:8000 some.host screen -x;  do
    echo "Server 'ssh' crashed with exit code $?. Respawning.." >&2
    sleep 1
done

Basically, that little shell script makes sure SSH stays nailed up and connected to my VPS, port forwards port 8000 to localhost for my web development stuff I play around with, and today I added -D 1080 which creates a SOCKS5 Proxy on port 1080 that will tunnel through SSH turning

Into

I use FoxyProxy in Firefox to automatically tunnel Netflix through the SOCKS proxy.  I could set it up in Chrome which is my primary browser, but this way I don’t have to turn the Proxy on and off between home and work.  I rarely have time to watch anything at work, but at least now I can.

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