| Self-Discovery |
[Oct. 27th, 2009|11:17 am] |
| [ | Feeling... |
| |  unfulfilled | ] |
I feel pangs around 11:30 every day at work. I had assumed I felt hungry without investing much thought into reaching that conclusion. On reflection, I realize now that I feel empty - there's a huge difference even though the symptoms are similar. |
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| It's been a while... |
[Aug. 8th, 2009|06:27 am] |
| [ | Feeling... |
| |  thankful | ] |
So yeah. Hi, LJ! I've been doing the Facebook thing lately and thinking about dabbling in Twitter (I've signed up but haven't done a blessed thing yet). Enforced shortness speaks volumes about life and society, but it fits a little better with where I am right now.
So I've been awake for a while and wanted to hit y'all up with a dose of introspection.
( Musing on Muses... )
...And all in less than 1000 words. Yay, flash introspection! |
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| Ketchup. |
[Jan. 3rd, 2009|03:23 pm] |
| [ | Feeling... |
| |  busy | ] |
Bullets for the attention-span-challenged.
* Gods help me, I'm on Facebook. It can be a timesink - especially all the game apps that are designed to suck in all of your friends (*cough* Hammerfall *cough*). On the plus side, I'm finding people from high school (that was over 20 years back now) that I never thought I'd catch up with again.
* I'm still a gamer nerd. I've submitted to Paizo's RPG Superstar open call again this year. I think I'll get closer than I did last year - my item is tighter and fills a niche that one of last year's judges specifically requested. We'll see on the 20th when the 32 who made the cut are announced...
* The Peanut is trying to decide if she needs a nap any more. It's a tough decision, filled with consternation and either late-night hyperactivity or all-day exhausted whining. Sometimes both. But she's napping now and I can get some of what's in my head out in this confounded electronic black box...
* Need another resume: this one needs to be IT Manager flavored. Will work on this afternoon. Maybe I was spoiled at my previous working-for-the-man jobs, but all of them had Christmas bonus checks. This year I've cut $2500 a month out of the expense side of the balance sheet and I get 1% of that back in a gift card to Uno's. I bet I'll still have to fight for my Q4 bonus in the next couple of weeks. So tired of all of it. |
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| Home again. |
[Dec. 12th, 2008|06:58 pm] |
| [ | Feeling... |
| |  exhausted | ] |
Home again - power came on 3 minutes before I walked in the door. Decided on oriental cuisine cooked elsewhere. Tried to get a voicemail on the way out the door to pick up food - still crappy cell signal. Talked to my immediate boss on the phone miniutes later in the car - power came back at work! The previous voicemail was him informing me that the CEO wants someone in the office 24/7 until the power comes back on. Yah, riiight.
Dinner - yay.
My IT hire heading in to work tonight to reconfig power and test systems - yay.
Working heat and waterbed heater - yay.
Hot water for the first shower in over 36 hours - YAY.
Now to get some sleep and try to get a plan together to defend against the ass reaming I'll be taking bright and early on Monday morning. My joy is boundless.
Brief list of IT issues for Monday:
- T1 phone failover worked, but the circuits were so jammed that they forwarded to fast busy signals instead of the answering service. So we manually forwarded them to the analog line, but...
- Our analog line crapped out due to the $6 phone I bought to prep for the previous power outage. So the phones were still forwarding to a fast busy until noon when we ironed it all out.
- The battery hack for the T1 lasted about 3-4 hours. We didn't have yet another spare set of batteries to throw at it (NOTE: Swap out those batteries with ones that work!). Holding off rewiring to a single smart jack until after we turn all but the voice T1 off.
- UPS control units need to be tested - running for 30 minutes and going into a sleep state is not cool at all. If this can't be worked around, they must be replaced - meaning reworking power so I can get some 220 inputs.
- Comcast broadband was down. They told me thay had 17 of 360+ accounts in the region working when I called at 1 today.
Mostly perfect storm stuff - the backups were in place but failed for one reason or another. It would have been nice if not all of them had crapped out simultaneously.
*shrug* It happens. I just feel bad for my IT hire - he trucked in from Gardner leaving his wife and two kids in a house with some fallen limb damage and a basement filling with water. I sent him home as soon as I could today and he still volunteered to come in tonight. So if anyone's looking for a good Windows/Cisco support guy, let me know... |
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| now for work. |
[Dec. 12th, 2008|02:12 pm] |
I'm at work now. The ups batteries work great. Now if the control units would stop going to sleep, we'll be able to keep the servers running for mor than 30 mins at a time...
Anyone looking for an IT manager out there? |
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| First peek at morning. |
[Dec. 12th, 2008|08:30 am] |
| [ | Feeling... |
| | tired | ] |
Lost power again around 4:45. Apparently the UPS will last for at least 3.5 hours.
Looks like work is down hard, though. I'll need to grab my phone and check the damage there.
No showers for us at the moment since the power is still off... |
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| It's late. |
[Dec. 12th, 2008|03:47 am] |
| [ | Feeling... |
| | tired | ] |
Power back on after 95 minutes. Fussy toddler with a cough tries kicking the crap out of me for 45 minutes, then I sneak her to bed so I can pee and take more cough medicine. Which makes me cough. Go fig.
Walk into bedroom wondering if I should head downstairs until the coughing stops, then the work phone rings. It's the UPS paging me saying it's lost power. Fire up the laptop and find out it was down for 12 seconds. The copier's hosed, but whatever - at least the server room isn't 100 degrees because we have no power protection for the AC...
Hearing chainsaws at 3AM strikes me as out of place. Needed, definitely; it's just an odd sound cutting through the rain. Limbs and trees still falling. We had the house shake a couple of times, but I don't think we've been hit. Nothing seems to be leaking or on fire, so it'll keep until morning.
Bed now. As long as I don't cough before I crash. Oy. |
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| Eye of the storm. |
[Dec. 12th, 2008|01:54 am] |
| [ | Feeling... |
| |  oddly content | ] |
It's now 1:40. Took a break to start a fire and I'm kicking myself for feeling crappy enough to talk myself out of bringing more wood inside. I have enough to last until morning, but I should get the new stuff drying as soon as possible.
Trees continue to crash all around. I've seen two neighbors with big portable lights out surveying the damage in the past hour.
I've taken a trip into the basement to silence the final UPS. I wonder how much run time I'll get out of a 4 year old BackUPS 500 when all it needs to power is a cable modem and a wireless firewall?
I cut the cables to the alarm system's siren. I also yanked the cable out of the contol unit because it was chirping. Silence reigns, underlined by the low hiss of burning wood and punctuated by coughing.
I'm very happy that nothing has hit the house and that I can gweep on my BlackBerry by firelight.
... But the ones that hit the ground and make the houar settle still have me worried. |
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| Here's hoping the router UPS lasts... |
[Dec. 12th, 2008|12:51 am] |
| [ | Feeling... |
| |  worried | ] |
It's just before 1AM. The power has been out for going on 15 minutes. I just got a new laptop battery this morning, I just didn't realize I'd be hard-testing it so soon.
It sounds like fireworks in slow motion as trees all around the house fall every minute or two. I've got a UPS beeping in the basement, and a non-functional alarm system chirping to let us know we lost power. I may need the wire cutters shortly to deal with that particular issue.
Here's hoping the morning finds us with everything intact. More as I'm able to post.
And it'd be nice if this cough went away. Shouldn't the cough medicine make you cough less instead of more? |
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| Yay! |
[Dec. 10th, 2008|09:13 am] |
| [ | Feeling... |
| |  sick | ] |
I'm home today! 3 hours of sleep! Doctor's appointment scheduling! Whee! |
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| Yo, gamin' peeps! |
[Dec. 9th, 2008|11:21 pm] |
| [ | Feeling... |
| |  creative | ] |
Paizo is at it again. Their Superstar 2009 open call is on. Top prize? You get a commission to write the adventure you proposed in round 5 (if you're lucky enough to make it to the Final 4). They're focusing on Villains instead of Countries this year. Your 200 word Wondrous Magical Item is due by 1/2/09.
Anyone else want to form a feedback circle? Or at least an editing circle to make sure the grammar doesn't suck? I've got 3 written up right now and a couple more in my head... |
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| Potpourri for $600. |
[Dec. 8th, 2008|04:47 pm] |
| [ | Feeling... |
| |  crazy | ] |
- The Colonial Tea House in Clinton is no more. I drove by last week and saw the "For Rent" signs in the window. Sad.
- Gigabit Ethernet is approximately 10 times faster that 100Mb Ethernet. Who knew? (We just switched everyone over to the new switches today - only 4 "why are things so slow?" issues. Bonus.)
- I'd like to be well now, please. We're going on a week of coughing and limited voice usage. At least today I feel like I'm getting better for a change.
- Tomorrow I get to drive to Gloucester for a Comcast install. And then we'll be down to 4 T1s. And we'll be saving about $700/month starting in January when they stop billing us for the T1s.
- Must drink more water. 'Nuff said.
- My office is much less of a pit than it has been. The piles of crap in front of the bookcase have moved so I can actually get to my binders without contorting. Organization rocks. |
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| macy's Entertainment. |
[Nov. 27th, 2008|11:06 am] |
| [ | Feeling... |
| | amused | ] |
The Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade has officially been Rickrolled. Rick Astley himself popped out of one of the floats.
I can't stop laughing and my daughter doesn't know why. |
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| Workin' on a Sunday... |
[Nov. 23rd, 2008|01:53 pm] |
| [ | Feeling... |
| | tired | ] |
Yep, had to run into work. And it was the UPS - all the lights were on but the load registered a big fat zero. I moved everything off the UPS and got it all back and patched. We'll deal with hacking the UPS to see if it's salvageable on Monday.
And I didn't need to field a call from the CEO today. Yay! |
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| Just 'cuz I'm on call... |
[Nov. 22nd, 2008|11:32 pm] |
| [ | Feeling... |
| | stressed | ] |
Friday night the email server froze up. Again. Which means that Dell's replacement of the RAID controller wasn't the issue with that server. And it means that we're on the phone with them on Monday so they can fix the problem. Again.
This morning the database server filled up. Again. Which means that nobody can work. Again. I finally slapped a UPS drive on that server on Friday afternoon, and I moved the backups to that drive this morning.
And tonight I went to check the SQL backups and couldn't VPN in. The only thing working was email, and lo, the new servers sent out that they each lost a power supply at 10PM. Which means we're probably without power at Corporate. Again. I reckon the power went out around 9. We've got battery power for at least 2.5 hours, which is now.
So now this is me going to bed and hoping the power comes back so I don't have to drive to work instead of going to church. If I do end up at work, I'll need to explain to the CEO why nothing is working and then explain that he has 2 choices: either continue to berate me and demand a straight-from-the-deepest-recesses-of-my-ass estimate for when it'll be back, or let me do my job and figure out what's happening so I can actually fix the problem.
I officially petition The Divine to please let the power and all the servers magically come back during the night. |
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| IT Retail Therapy. |
[Nov. 21st, 2008|03:34 pm] |
| [ | Feeling... |
| | busy | ] |
UPS Batteries? Currently on a truck from AZ. Finally.
7 VPN Routers? Ordered.
More backup media? Check.
New HP Multi-Function Printers for last 2 field offices? Should arrive onsite on Monday.
750GB USB drive for backups? On its way.
2 48 Port Gigabit Switches? Waiting for the eCheck to clear. Had to cheap out and get non-stackable switches, but we've still got 80% Win2K workstations which are lucky to handle 100Mbps speeds...
And the new database server is still on track for Q1. If I can finesse the SQL Server licenses, I might be able to squeeze in a pizza box server as part of that purchase.
Whee! |
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| Catch Up. |
[Nov. 19th, 2008|12:47 pm] |
| [ | Feeling... |
| | exhausted | ] |
The saga continues...
Skullduggery was a non-event. We were asked to seize a personal laptop to copy all the work-related data from it for safekeeping. But the Target took it with him to the meeting where he got let go. We dodged an ethical grey area with that one. The Target's crony seems to be settling in with the new regime since the Target threw him under the bus. Shamelssly and repeatedly.
We're finally having a budget meeting tomorrow. One of the things on the list for discussion is "system uptime is at an all-time low". Dude, you've been sitting on the same infrastructure for 6 years hoping nothing will break. We're finally fixing the things for which you gave us money while other things are breaking because they're too damn old (like our SMC switch that stops working randomly). How is that our fault?
Sick toddler = not fun. I figure I've gotten 7.5 hours of sleep so far this week. She's better, but both parents are now exhausted enough to get sick. Ick.
Here's hoping the rest of the week gets sunnier in my head. |
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| Conservation of Disasters. |
[Nov. 10th, 2008|10:24 pm] |
| [ | Feeling... |
| | disappointed | ] |
Charter finally replaced the cable between the pole and my house. Take the splitter out of the mix and we can watch Bravo again. Check off one in the "done" column.
Got cranky about the IT budget at work. Was promised a "let's talk on Wednesday" - better than nothing.
And now for the crappy side of IT: being management's bully boy in escorting someone out the door. Process started today with taking over admin (and associated passwords) on a server, followed by seekrit copying of files from a laptop in use. More details on Wednesday. Skullduggery sucks. |
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| On Power and Survival. |
[Nov. 10th, 2008|09:32 am] |
| [ | Feeling... |
| |  satisfied | ] |
Saturday went really well. The T1 MUX UPS hack held up - we never lost phones over 2 hours and 20 minutes without power. And that means moving that PC off of the phone system UPS got us some extra time there.
Expected: We lost our servers 70 minutes in. Earlier than the 90 minutes we had last time, but whatever. We cleared off the smaller big UPS to handle just network equipment, then we plugged one power supply from the mail server and backup server into it. Unexpected: Those two servers were up for the entire time.
So with 4-year-old batteries and some creative shutdowns (we had 6 machines running instead of 10 last time), we managed to keep email and phones up and running for 140 minutes.
And it only took me all of last week to set up and manage.
ONWARD! |
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