2003-04-16: A Moment with Tom the Grey

A Moment with Tom the Grey

Apr 16 2003 2:15PM

Well, it is my turn to submit comments from my team, so hopefully I can entertain you with who I am and what I do.

My name is Tom Carlile and I am the team lead for the Operations group here at OSI. Our group is responsible for administering all the Ultima Online shards and their backend infrastructure. Everything that is not specifically a development or internal database issue is handled by our group. I think a lot of people underestimate the complexity of the UO backend. Not only do we spend a lot of time preparing and protecting ourselves from hardware failures, but we're also the ones working through the night to get UO shards and subsystems back online when one of those outages does happen. It's rough hours sometimes, but bringing a crashed shard back up and watching its player count rise up to nearly 2000 in minutes can be a rewarding thing at 3 AM. We get our share of insults on the boards, but we still care about the players and sacrifice a lot in the name of keeping these imaginary worlds alive and well.

When I am not off saving worlds from destruction and time-warps, I am usually spending time toward one of my other interests, such as sound synthesis.

I've been teaching myself the fundamentals of substractive synthesis and music production for a couple years now. What began as a drum machine and keyboard synth sharing a MIDI clock has turned into a studio full of gear all interconnected and sequenced via computer. Recently I acquired some studio space at OSI, and have been primarily working on sound effects and environmental sounds for Ultima. It really can be a lot of fun trying to find or synthesize the right sound effect for some random game monster. My favorite music influences right now are Juno Reactor and Thievery Corporation.

Working at OSI has given me a great opportunity to go beyond my forte of UNIX systems and network administration. Lately, I've been able to spend some work-time on designing sound and environmental effects. I’ve also been able to follow up on my interest in Japanese culture; since our Japanese market is so large, I have been able to travel to Japan many times in order to maintain and upgrade our systems there. There are not many UNIX sysadmins out there that get to do the things I do at work, and for that I consider myself very lucky.

Back to the machines for me, and I hope this helped acquaint you with one of the many nameless and dedicated people behind Ultima Online, keeping the fantasy alive and well for over 5 years now.

Tom "Tom the Grey" Carlile

Sr. Unix Admin, Origin Systems