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Looking For Quacks In The Pavement

Month: September 2002

  • Retreat! Retreat!

    It’s just about 10:00 Monday night as I write this. I won’t be able to post the entry until I get back to the office in the morning, however, as my room is apparently one of the ones not yet blessed with DSL internet connections. Ah well, it could have been a lot worse.

    First, the resort. It’s in the foothills, nicely situated in heavily wooded surroundings. Some time when I have lots and lots of money I’ll come back and explore what hiking opportunities may be nearby. I won’t get that chance on this trip, unfortunately.

    The meetings themselves went about as well as any other department heads’ shindig. We talked a lot about what our goals are. We took a valiant stab at creating a mission statement for our local cluster. Positive and negative aspects of our workplace were brought to light. We even talked a little bit about The Tipping Point, the book that served as the catalyst for this event to begin with. Towards the end we were given colored hats and fresh new logoed shirts.

    Why colored hats, you ask? Our “scheduled fun” took the form of croquet. This isn’t the backyard variety, either. The layout and rules are a bit different, and rather strict. We originally were broken up into teams with the intent of holding a sort of tournament, but most folks really wanted to eat, watch a game on TV and get blitzed at one of the condos. Some of us got better accomodations than others, you see. (I’m not complaining: I’m tucked away in a small and quiet portion of the resort… far away from the noise and frivolity. Praise the goddesses.)

    There was a last-minute rally by a sizable group of us to get some more use out of those nice (lamplit) croquet greens. An idea borne of alcohol and pure contrariness led us to play “double green croquet.” Four wickets up, four wickets back, four down the middle, both posts. The eight of us had a complete blast. (Score? Seven wickets to five, the team with seven hit both posts. Who knew I was a croquet savant?) After we lost and gained personnel, one more regulation-style game was assayed. The teaming of David Lichtman, Keevin Wagner and myself remains undefeated, thank you, thank you.

    And now I’m out on my feet and have to get up at 7:00 or so if I want to have a nice full breakfast on the company dime. There’s one more meeting, then lunch, and after that we are encouraged to enjoy the available facilities at will. Gary Hilliard (Chief Engineer) is my ride, though, and we both agreed to bail for the office as soon as possible. (He’s got work to do, I have a vacation to prepare for.)

    All in all, there are worse ways I can imagine spending a day in the Cascade foothills.

  • What I feared has come to pass

    A bit less than 6,000 files into a 25,000 file transfer, Beast’s RAID controller crapped out. I was forced to hard-reset the machine and start the transfer again. Luckily I’m using ‘rsync’ so only files that aren’t already on the Netware server will be copied over. If I had to start the whole transfer over after every crash, I’d never get this done.

    At least, that’s the way I’m looking at it now: that Beast crashes are inevitable after X amount of data moves off the drive in one steady stream. Apparently sustained data transfer is a big no-no with this 3Ware RAID controller. Dammit.

    Oh yeah. You don’t know what Beast is. Well, the Enco broadcast audio system has a central server, in our case a Netware server named KGON_FS. (Clever, wot?) I was tasked with building a cheap standby server in case of emergencies, and so Beast was born. It’s a fairly large chassis with a fairly large quantity of drive space packed inside. It runs RedHat Linux 7.0, with some customization of course.

    Every night during the week, Beast synchronizes its storage to match precisely what’s on the Netware server. And in cases like tonight, where the Netware server’s large storage volume has been rebuilt, Beast is the source for restoring data to the newly created volume.

    I’m praying there aren’t any crashes while I’m at home later today. Well, I would be praying if I believed in a particular deity to pray to. You get the idea. I can’t live here at the office, really I can’t.

  • Where I stand, or more accurately where I sit.

    As things stand at about 4pm Pacific time, the massive file transfer is just over halfway done. My phone will let me know if for some reason the Samba share on Beast disappears (a clear sign that the 3Ware RAID controller has barfed again). Knocking on wood, if I get no such message then I’ll be able to confidently walk into the office tomorrow and prepare to finish this damnable project. After a decent night’s sleep, of course. (So far I’ve clocked about two hours’ sleep in the last 35.)

    Then I can prepare for the retreat. Turns out I’m staying overnight at this mountain resort. (It really is. The place is named “The Resort At The Mountain.” And I’d love to know how they got their hands on that domain, since I’m sure that other resort owners would gladly kill for it. But I digress.) Wendi is sure that I’ll end up sharing a room with somebody. I think that if that were the case we’d have been asked about who we want to buddy with, but then again communications isn’t always the strongest part of our company hierarchy. We’ll see. I’d really really like to have a room of my own. I like my fellow department heads well enough, but I’m almost certain I don’t want to sleep near any of them… and I can almost guarantee they feel the same way about me.

    Note to self: Don’t forget to dub that tape, change your voicemail greeting and look at Matt Lund’s PC. Okay, self? Do you think you can handle all of that? Good boy.

    I could really use a decent night’s sleep. Or hadn’t you noticed?

  • I’ll say!

    Ginerva seems to have tapped directly into my usual rant to the company salesforce about printing technique…
    Helpful Printer Tip

  • Keeping In Touch With My Friday Five

    • Would you say that you’re good at keeping in touch with people? – Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Depends on the person, depends on how close of a friend (s)he is, depends on the nature of our relationship. In other words, like most things in life “it depends.”
    • Which communication method do you usually prefer/use: e-mail, telephone, snail mail, blog comments, or meeting in person? Why? – Yes, no, no, yes, and especially yes. I’m not a “phone person,” and I couldn’t even tell you why. That’s just how it is. You might not suspect it of me, but I really prefer to meet face-to-face. Email and instant messaging and blog comments are merely little ways to keep in touch between real get-togethers.
    • Do you have an instant messenger program? How many? Why/why not? How often do you use it? – Once again, note that the Friday Five is actually the Friday Ten Or So. *sigh* I started with ICQ, got Yahoo! for the hell of it, and eventually gave up and went AIM. I’ve dabbled in Jabber, but it tends to universally suck dingos. ICQ has gotten flakier and more spam-prone over the years, and Yahoo! is just plain “nucking futs.” AIM is the IM system of choice. And yes, if I’m connected to the Internet at all I can be found running at least AIM if not all three.
    • Do most of your close friends live nearby or far away? – Um. Let’s see, Mari lives in the Portland metro area. Heather moved to Cali. Ben lives in town but he only gets in touch once every four-to-six months then vanishes again. That’s all of my close friends, folks. There are some other folks who I hope grow into being close friends, but…
    • Are you an “out of sight, out of mind” person, or do you believe that “distance makes the heart grow fonder”? – Yes.

    Friday Five

  • Oh-Dark-Thirty

    It’s 11:00 on a Friday night. Ordinarily I’d be parked in front of the television, or perhaps playing a bit of Diablo II with The Missus.

    Not tonight, though. I’m at the office, watching large audio files transfer from one server to another, one at a time, one after another, one by one.

    The current estimate is that this process will be completed early on Sunday morning. What am I doing here, then? Babysitting. I simply cannot get any rest until I’m reasonably confident that the file transfer won’t go horribly wrong during the first few hours. This is just a part of how seriously I take my job.

    Wendi’s due to pick me up as soon as she wakes tomorrow morning, which will probably mean I leave at 9:00. Don’t worry about me… I have my internet and my music to keep me going. Life’s really not that bad.

    I apologize for being moderately incoherent. It’s been a long day. Oh yes, and that new version of Qualitap won’t land until early next week, right about the time I’m on that department-heads retreat. Mwahahaha.

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