This morning I took the 5 Love Languages online quiz again prior to sending the link to Paul. The quiz is a compliment to the book by the same name. The concept is that people express appreciation to each another in one of 5 "languages". In addition people best receive appreciation in one of the 5 as well. Relationships are most successful when you speak the language to the other person that they most appreciate.

Despite the presence of "the L word" in the title, I find this helpful in most all relationships. I think of it as Myers-Briggs of appreciation. For example, if Jonobie appreciates quality time most, why expend effort buying her trinkets?

Every time I've taken it, I've always maxed out Words of Affirmation¹ (give me a sincere compliment and I'm good for a month). I was startled to find that was no longer true. I had a tie for Quality Time and Physical Touch then followed by Words of Affirmation.²

This was really obvious when taking the quiz too (it's only 30 questions and easy to see which answers map to which language). And it's dead-on. I still value affirming words, but find myself really missing quality time with friends and physical touch. My friends have probably gotten more hugs from me recently than ever before -- and they can expect tons more. It also explains why I don't enjoy being alone as much as I use to.

I'm more interested in why it changed rather than the change itself. This will give me something to chew on all weekend.

¹ Which I blogged a bit about back here.

² I told Chris this revelation tonight and he laughed at me. Said he could have told me that months ago.

Papa's plant is blooming.

My maternal grandfather, Papa Werner, died from pancreatic cancer in 2003. I remember this period in my life really well as there were a lot of important things happening. I bought my first house just months before he passed. Just weeks after he passed I met Benjamin.

After his funeral I took one of the live plants given to the family: a peace lily. I've no idea who gave it, but it's been "Papa's plant" ever since. It has travelled from Littlefield to Austin to 2 different places in Denver and finally up to Seattle. Often in those moves it had other plant company, but Papa's plant is the only one still with me.

Papa Werner was a generous, hard-working man, loving man with a ready smile. I can still see him telling me a story, being interrupted and corrected by my grandmother, and him smiling at me with that "she always thinks she's right" smile. I remember trips to the lake with him, early morning fishing, and getting pulled around the lake behind the boat.

Papa's plant has had some rough spots since its trip from Littlefield. It thrived in Austin, but fared poorly in Denver -- it was simply too dry I think. I had a scare last year when I left my blinds open on a trip out of town and the plant in the sun. It was a very wilty plant when I got back. Luckily after a lot of water it was back to normal. Papa's plant is resilient and tenacious - just like my grandfather.

I never came out to Papa. I don't think he would have taken it well. He had very strong opinions that men shouldn't have long hair or wear earrings - and I imagine being gay would have been in his "not ok" column too. When I came out to my Granny she said Papa would have loved me no matter what. And no one knew my Papa better than she did.

Papa's plant has never bloomed since the funeral. I'm fully aware that the plant blooming now has no spiritual significance, just all the right factors to favor that biological response.

It's been almost exactly 9 years and Papa's plant is blooming.

My gaydar is severely broken or at least so miscalibrated to be totally useless. My friend Karen told me that the really hot guy in our pottery class not only bats for my team, but was even flirting with me while glazing last semester.

This is entirely unacceptable for a single gay man and I'm not sure how to fix it. This is not the first time someone has pointed out that I was being flirted with and didn't know it. I'm not totally socially inept, but apparently I'm inept enough.

This will never do.

Yesterday I received a lovely hand-written card in the mail from my ex-mother-in-law. It is one of the nicest, most heart-warming cards I've ever received -- second only to the letter my grandmother wrote me.

I won't go into details, the card was written for me, but it reminded me how something as simple as a card can mean so much.

This morning I came across an interesting difference between RHEL 5 and RHEL 6 (and of course their CentOS brethren).

In the RHEL 5 kernel, when an application writes to a file opened with O_SYNC over NFS, those writes come across the wire as FILE_SYNC writes -- ie: stable.

In the RHEL 6 kernel, when an application writes to a file opened with O_SYNC over NFS, those writes come across as UNSTABLE immediately followed by a COMMIT. To get the writes to come across the wire as FILE_SYNC, you have to use the O_DIRECT flag (either by itself or in addition to the O_SYNC flag).

This is a rather significant change and has storage-system impacts. Good for both users and implementers to be aware of.

Today I was promoted from a Software Development Test Engineer III to a Principal SW Quality Engineer. By my calculations this now puts me at the same level in EMC as I was in IBM when I left. The mapping between IBM's positions and EMC's positions are much closer than Isilon's to either of them.

This was the write-up my manager put together that was sent out with the announcement:

In his first year and several months Casey stepped up in a huge way and wrangled the product characterization performance testing into submission for Habanero and Chopu. He participated in numerous customer performance-related calls for betas, evaluations, and escalations and onsite visits including presentations, demos, and lab tours. Casey has been instrumental in leading feature level performance testing for HDFS and many Mavericks features. Finally, he contributed a TCP related fix that improved 10GigE streaming read performance by approximately 3 times.

An interesting aside: Through a clerical error, I've actually been a Principle engineer in title only since last April when we transitioned to EMC's HR system. It appears someone fat-fingered the data entry.

Several weeks ago I finished my taxes and tomorrow I pay the additional $1k I owe the federal government (not the $5k - $7k as I originally estimated). As I do so, I reflect on how I believe I get a great return on the taxes I pay - both federal, state, and local.

My social security taxes aren't funding my retirement (that depends on my nieces, nephews, and their children) but it does pay for my 3 grandparents' retirement. Ditto Medicare. My federal income taxes go to a whole array of things, the ones that immediately come to mind:

• education funding for my nieces and nephews -- and my parents and grandparents' taxes enabled me to have college loans
• assisting the less fortunate with Medicaid and other assistance programs
• highway construction and maintenance
• food and drug safety
• disease prevention & medical research
• amazing astronomy research and all the other mind-blowing exploration NASA does (stop and consider we have machines on Mars. Mars people!)
• and tons of others that I'm not thinking about but take advantage of daily

Are there inefficiencies in the system I wish didn't exist? Yes. Are there areas I wish my taxes didn't fund? You bet. But government is an imperfect system and we should never let the goal of perfection be the enemy of the good.

Politicians: stop trying to lower my taxes -- or claiming to be able to lower my taxes. You'd be better served educating people about what services they receive from their taxes than selling them the pipe dream of lower taxes with the same level of services.

Today I realized that in so many ways I'm back to where I was a year ago. Except this time around I've got more friends -- deeper friendships too -- which is a boon.

Still - I need to do more than throw myself at my job. Working late nights and weekends just because I've got no better way to spend that time isn't exactly healthy.

Despite downing 2 protein shakes every day and eating everything that's put in front of me, I've not gained weight -- muscle mass or otherwise -- which has been my objective. Instead I've lost almost 10lbs since the beginning of the year.

While I realize I'm not getting anything except derision from most of you about this 'problem', it's quite frustrating for me¹. My options seem to be decrease my physical activity (running 7.5 miles in an hour like I did this morning can't be helping) or I need to rather drastically increase my caloric intake. Since decreasing my activity is unlikely to happen, it's time to bring out the burgers. This is sure to make my already borderline cholesterol worse, but maybe, just maybe, I can get back up to a buck-sixty this time next month like I was at the beginning of the year. Gotta have goals!

¹ Can I claim this is a 3rd world problem? I mean, not getting enough to eat is a common 3rd world problem... I'm joking!<sup>2

2</sup> Yes, I'm totally going to hell for footnote 1.

Last week I received my first annual review from my tenture at EMC Isilon and I was ecstatic with the result: Far Exceeds, the highest rating. The rating description reads:

Far exceeds goals in all areas. Has depth of knowledge, competence, and reactivity that are not often equaled. Recognized by all as an expert. Quality and timeliness of results occur despite challenging circumstances. Takes initiative. Makes challenging goals and fulfills them. - Exceptional Performance

My favorite take-away from the review write-up were these two sentences:

Even as a performance test ninja, your focus is measuring and reporting on the results, investigating, and automating. You took this to a new dimension by fixing the code yourself, getting it reviewed, and collecting compliments from development in the process.

This excerpt excites me both because it recognizes my work on that pesky TCP problem I fixed (well, Max fixed the core problem, I just identified the problem and mitigated the symptom, but still) and because it includes my "title" of Performance Test Ninja.

I will say, however, that this rating merely continues my trend of being a top performer that I started at IBM. (It's not bragging if it's true, right? Right?) It's not hard to do a good job when you love what you do and the people you work with.