Tag: work

Decompressing

Just finished fighting with a Linux server that somehow ended up re-activating a service which it didn’t need, but which interferes with a service that it does need. *grumble*.

Boss returned this morning from a week out following back surgery…and has jury duty. Figures if he actually gets called in, he can easily get it dismissed, but for now, the only number he has is for the automated message.

Managed to mostly avoid fire+smoke problems this weekend, except Sunday afternoon why my eyes just wouldn’t stop itching. A co-worker had to evacuate his parents from Yorba Linda on Saturday, but their house made it through okay.

Got together with andrea_wot, wayens and gasean for Andrea’s birthday and monopolized a table at Cosi for about 4 hours on Sunday. Fortunately they didn’t seem to mind!

Caught up on comics & Netflix over the weekend. Read Crecy, about the 1300s battle in which the English longbow triumphed over vastly superior French numbers. Mostly about medieval war tactics, swearing, and xenophobia. Narrated by an utter bastard who breaks the fourth wall a lot. Did I mention it was by Warren Ellis? Also read Chrono Mechanics, about a squad of techs whose job is to repair time. A bit too crazy even for me, and I loved Tales from the Bully Pulpit. And finally Harley and Ivy, a collection of stories focusing on Batman villains Harley Quinn and Poison Ivy, which was great fun.

As for TV, we’ve finished season 1 of Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle. I also wrapped up watching season 5 of The Batman (though I haven’t watched the earlier seasons, and based on this one, probably won’t). And then there’s Stan Lee’s Lightspeed…I had to watch it because it’s about a speedster, but OMG it was awful. At least now I know Netflix’ "Watch Instantly" service works well with our system/connection. Snarky commentary will go up at Speed Force in the next week or two.

We’ve backed off on the house hunting for a bit. We actually got a counteroffer on one of the places we looked at a few weeks ago, but decided not to take it. We need to reevaluate what we’re looking for before we dive back in.

Drove alenxa to an interview this morning. Thought it was in one of those two new buildings by the spectrum until she told me the address, and realized it was actually across the street from where I work. Highly convenient for today, but the actual job location is off in another direction.

I think I want Monday back

Seriously.

Yesterday morning I got a tetanus shot.  No pressing reason, just it was time to renew.  By lunchtime it hurt. like. hell.  To the point where I was using my right hand to position my left arm on the desk so that I could type without moving anything above my elbow.  Driving home was “fun.”  I think it was worst last night — trying to find a comfortable sleeping position was “fun” too — but it’s not exactly fantastic this morning either.

I seriously considered staying home if it was still bad enough to make driving difficult, until I remembered it was Microsoft Patch Day.  Then I started seriously considering looking up the bus schedule.  It seemed to go better this morning, but that was under the influence of aspirin.

This morning I got in and discovered that our database for spam filter training had collected enough bad data that it was consistently labeling a ton of spam with a 0% rating. Trying to reset it led to ~45 minutes of various services either not working or having to be disabled so that other services could work, and of course phone calls. (In the middle of that, alenxa  called and I had to cut her off.  Sorry!)  On the plus side, it looks like part of the performance problems we’ve been having are related to the large size of the database, so it should run more smoothly for a while.

Edit to add: Also, got a response from a customer to whom I asked several questions in the for X or Y? — all of which were answered “yes” or “no.”  Yes to X or yes to Y?  *grumble*

Email seems under control for now.  Off to deal with patch day.  *Le sigh*

Current Mood: 😡stressed

Tuesday Morning, 3AM

After realizing I was still way behind on sleep debt, I decided to go to bed early last night. I think it was around 10:00. Then in the middle of the night, my phone got an alert from our monitoring system at work. I dragged myself out of bed, checked whether I could get onto the system remotely, and saw that it wasn’t responding to anything but pings.

Whee.

So I threw on the first clothes I found and drove in to the office at a quarter to three in the morning so I could get the server running again.

I never assume that I’m going to be the only one in the office anymore. Some of my co-workers tend to keep late hours (though none so late as the guy who actually slept during the day and came in around the time everyone else went home). And once I was in around midnight to deal with another server crash, and another coworker walked in with a bunch of his friends. They were on the way back from somewhere and he’d stopped to pick something up.

I didn’t see anyone last night, but this morning I got asked by another coworker, “So, what were you doing in so early this morning?” He’d been working late and just crashed at the office instead of going home. Apparently he woke up just enough to see me when I walked by.

Like This!

Stuck at work trying to finish a project, or at least get it to a state where I can finish it early enough tomorrow morning that we can do testing. Brain turning to mush. Had to pause to stave off a potential flamewar in blog comments. Almost sprayed tea all over keyboard during “The Song That Goes Like This” (Spamalot).

Current Music: The Who: “Behind Blue Eyes”

Anyone got Mac OS XP?

Remember the client with the clueless offsite developer? I just got a new one.

Apparently their developer was asking whether we’re running MySQL Server 2005. The problem is, there is no such thing. MySQL doesn’t do years, they do outline-style numbers with the Major.Minor.Patch scheme, so they’re currently on 5.0.51a.

Now, Microsoft does use years for their SQL server, and there is in fact a Microsoft SQL Server 2005.

I wouldn’t expect the general public to know this, but a web developer who works on database driven sites using MySQL ought to have a bit of a clue.

Normally, I’d chalk it up to a momentary lapse, lack of sleep, lack of coffee, etc. But this client’s developer has previously demonstrated a lack of knowledge in areas critical to his supposed expertise.

Current Mood: 🙂amused

You’re Here!

Forgot to set my alarm last night, so I overslept by about 25 minutes. Though I probably would’ve hit snooze 2 or 3 times anyway, so it evened out. Decided to finish breakfast before leaving, though, instead of eating at my desk, so I got in later than I intended.

Stepped out of the elevator and the VP was just stepping out the door, saw me, and said, “You’re here!”

“Um… I was here yesterday afternoon too…”

“Now you can fix the network!”

Yep — the internal network had gone down this morning, right about the time I walked out the door. They’d been trying to call me at home (which didn’t work, since, well, I wasn’t there). So I spent the next 20 minutes looking at blinkenlights and trying to figure out which boxes needed to be reset and so on.

In retrospect, I’m glad I finished breakfast first.