It's probably obvious to many admins out there, but today I learned first hand. If you've got an SFTP / SCP sessions that starts out quick and slows down radically after a short time, you've probably got a duplex mismatch between your server and your network switch. Of course, this didn't occur to me right away, so I ended up looking for problems with ssh, traffic shaping on the part of our routers, or anything else that seemed logical.

I recognize that I haven't blogged much lately, and it's not due to inactivity; in fact, it's much the opposite. So here's the summary review of what I've been up to.

• Went to Hawaii in September to attend a friend's wedding. Hawaii hasn't changed much from when I visited there in the Navy. Did some things I hadn't done the other half-dozen times I was there. Oahu is a traffic nightmare. If I go to Hawaii again on my own, I'm going to one of the other islands.
• I'm playing in three bands these days. I'm still doing the psychobilly project, but I got asked to come back to the metal / funk project I was playing in before to record a couple of songs and play some shows. (I'm not super keen with the way the songs were mixed down.) I really enjoy playing with these people, but we're not rehearsing enough for us to really move forward. Della, the guitar player in this project, and I have started a side project that sounds like something between stoner rock and punk.
• Job change: For a variety of reasons, I decided that it was time to leave my former job. I'm now working at a place where I'm doing almost no UNIX and mostly datamart / ETL stuff, which is a completely new field for me, but one that I feel can be up-and-coming. I really don't miss my old job. Our department had been restructured twice, and after watching a lot of qualfied, hard working co-workers not being promoted in lieu of people that would simply tell the boss what he wanted to hear, I realized that there definitely wasn't going to be any upward mobility for me.