Daily Archives: May 25, 2006

Life in general

The sweet smell of success

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Or at least paint. Given the size of the rooms in this house and how much circulation there is, there really is no lingering aroma of paint hanging heavy in the house. But while the painter was here, whipping through the remainder of the work, there was a hint of it in the air – the smell of progress. He finished very quickly and very neatly and the main living areas are now complete. It looks great, and the colors are superb.

Dinner tonight: szechuan beef, fried rice, and chicken lo mein. It takes quite a lot of water to get through a meal. I’ve blown through three liters for two small portions of food. I think some ice cream is in order.

Geek stuff

Some days really are longer than others

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Now, we all know that the days are all the same length, really, give or take a few nanoseconds. So perhaps that should be some days really seem longer than others. Sometimes people ask us what goes on behind the scenes – what is it that they never see about what we do? And specifically, what does one of my days look like?

Let me tell you about some of this atypical day.

My day actually began yesterday morning. At around 2 AM this morning, as I was wrapping up some work, one of the servers started behaving very erratically. After working on it a bit, I decided to just start moving everything off that server to another. Piece of cake, right? Not this time. I had thought I would simply run a backup and then restore it to a new server we brought online. Again, not this time: the server would not stay up long enough for the backup to complete. Think of it this way: you’re on your computer, writing a paper or doing some other work that requires about an hour or so. But your computer keeps crashing on you about every 15 minutes. It’s annoying, and difficult to get anything done. It’s the same with servers. If for some reason they won’t stay up for extended periods of time, it’s difficult to get some things done to make it easier to recover when you move files to another server.

So, since the wee hours of this morning, I’ve been babysitting this server and moving files off it as quickly as I can given its relative instability.

To add to the fun, just after these issues started, I had an incredibly upset stomach, the likes of which I’d not experienced since treatment. At around 3 AM, I wound up puking up what I’d eaten several hours before, which was unpleasant to say the least.

And to top off the fun, at around the same time as all of this, another server just died completely. It wouldn’t return from a reboot, and in fact, stopped booting at all. After puking and cleaning up, I hauled myself out to the NOC to take a look at the thing. Replaced the cards for the primary SCSI drive, replaced the fan, replaced the cables, and nothing. I did, however, manage to bring it up in a fashion so I could retrieve the last good backup that had run from the night before so it could be restored to another server. That restore took about an hour or so to complete, with all the cleanup items, like reconfiguring certain options to match the original server, following after that.

Finally this morning, I managed to grab about an hour or so nap, then got back up and started working again on the original server problem, continuing to move accounts to other locations.

Then, a bright spot: we get a call that the painter we had lined up (who bailed previously, being too busy) would be available after all. That meant I had to get myself showered up and head to Home Depot for some more paint and miscellaneous items in order to be home before the painter arrived. As soon as I stepped into the shower, the delivery guys showed up with the new mattresses. This is actually a good thing. Since I can now once again sleep lying down instead of at a 45 degree angle (because choking was a very real hazard during treatment and well into recovery), this means that for the first time in a long time, I’ll be able to sleep in a bed. As soon as I attach my head and footboards and put the sheets on it, that is.

Off to Home Depot, where one guy is working paint. I join the crowd of about 15 waiting to give mixing instructions. There are other things I need, but naturally, you can’t leave the queue until you place your order. I wait, the clock ticking in my head, since the painter is supposed to arrive wihtin the hour. Paint in hand, a few things grabbed that are needed in a dire way, such as screen for the sliding doors to the patio, and I’m rushing back to the house.

And here we are, running up to about 32 hours in this particular day. The painter has arrived, and is working on getting the last of things finished tonight. I’ve eaten once since 10 AM, and I’m debating what to do about some sustenance here. Can’t leave the house, although the painter looks like he’s making great progress, and who knows, maybe I’ll be able to make it out of here to do just that.