Since I haven’t flogged the webcomic in a while…
I’m doing a special event for the next four weeks over at Quacked Panes: The Twelve Days of Christmas, as interpreted by my cast of toy ducks. The comic schedule is each Monday, Wednesday and Friday between today and Christmas itself.
Enjoy, won’t you please?
Would the Palindrome be the arena in which Michael and Sarah duke it out for supremacy?
…
Among the items you should give thanks for today, perhaps, you might include, “I don’t live inside of Karel’s mind.” Heh.
I left work at five minutes past five PM. About fifteen minutes later I ran across the Hillsboro Airport Park-and-Ride lot to catch the MAX, bound for home. This was one of the shiny new trains which look like someone elongated the hell out of a new-model VW Beetle.
Between Quatama and Willow Creek we experienced a panic stop for no explained reason, and we waited between stops for five minutes or so. Okay, this sort of thing isn’t too unusual, so it seemed like no big deal. Then we got to Elmonica, and we waited. And waited. Five minutes into that wait, the operator tells us that the train ahead of us is having trouble and “momentarily” they’ll have it moved out of our way.
We sat there for half an hour. Well, okay, most of us stood rather than sitting: It was a standing-room-only train when I boarded the thing.
So, there are problems with these sleek-looking new trains. Chief among them? The designers clearly didn’t expect anyone to ride them who were in possession of lower limbs. The mid-car seats face either a bulkhead (with no place for your knees at all if you’re at the “window” seat) or reversed seats that are placed so close to you that nobody can actually sit across from you, ensuring that either half of those four seats go unoccupied or that everyone’s knees are between someone else’s legs.
Classy, isn’t it? But wait, there’s more!
Four of the mid-car benches are at the same elevation as the rest in that section, but without the raised flooring to rest your feet on… so unless you’re really tall, your legs just dangle there. And if you are tall enough to sit there, you won’t want to because (again) there’s no legroom unless you’re in one of the four aisle seats. And nobody wants to sit in the “window” seat at those benches because…
The raised sections at each end of the train aren’t much better. I like the idea of the extra seating at the non-operator-cab end of the train, but everything else about those sections is designed as if someone took the worst parts of the existing low-floor train designs and exaggerated them. Everything’s more crowded, and now they’ve sunk the aisleway a few inches so you’ve a much greater chance of stumbling into your fellow passengers and/or one of the myriad metal bars.
I’m utterly, thoroughly underwhelmed by these new trains. In the future, if I’m faced with the choice of boarding one and it looks like all of the not-completely-crappy seats are taken, I’ll just wait for the next one unless I’m under severe time constraints.
Yes, it’s that bad. TriMet has committed an epic fail with these stupid, garish, unfriendly, noisy new trains.
Anyway. Just to make my commute a bit more fun, we had not-one-but-two dogs on the train (bookending my escape routes, of course) and one utterly brilliant bint decided to take her bike and park it in the middle of the aisle among the mid-car seating area. I mean, it’s not like people sitting there want to be able to get off the train at some point, right? Never mind getting jabbed by handlebars!
I left work at five minutes past five PM, and got home at twenty-five minutes past seven PM.
I’m glad that tomorrow is Friday.
I can’t believe I’ve gone this long without making a ThinkGeek wishlist. Not very geeky of me, eh?
I know! I’ll make up those lost geek points by making said list, then blogging about it!
Genius.
Well, hey there. Brent went and redesigned his blog, and it looks rather clever. (How did he get those tilted random images? You know me, I love a good random image selector…)
It began as a simple series of tasks: Back up the server’s drive, back up the database, click “Install” on the vendor-provided patch update tool, wait for completion.
Since you’re reading this you already know that it became un-simple.
I started at 9pm. The disk backup was the only part which went according to plan. Backing up the database resulted in an error, something to do with a broken full-text index. So I looked at the backup logs and discovered something even worse: The target drive for the backup files? Completely full.
Well, kudos to our maintenance plan and our error reporting system!
Some furious clearing of disk space later, I tried the backup again and ran into that full-text index problem. Research led me to a solution. With that implemented I was able to make the backup. And that’s that, right?
Wrong!
The upgrade installer complained about not finding one of the two full-text indexes. Yes, the one I’d rebuilt. Forty minutes of poking, prodding, rebuilding, recreating, rebuilding, repopulating and cussing later, I was able to make that particular patch happy… only to bump into another patch with another error. This time it claimed that a particular column in the database wasn’t full-text indexed.
I’ve come to hate SQL Server 2005 and full-text indexing, by the by. I know, you’re shocked.
I looked. Yes, indeed, that column is being full-text indexed. Bite me, updater! But alas, nothing I did could get past that update patch… and they simply must be done in order, don’t you know?
“Okay,” I thought, “maybe the product is in a usable state.”
You can guess the answer.
Sure, we could open up the company display, or look at time sheets, or activities… but the service board? Not so much. A giant error dialog full of cryptic SQL-looking gibberish appeared, and from what I was able to tease out of it, the problem was caused by a missing view in one of the database tables. What’s more, this is a view that didn’t exist yet. So, one patch creates a dependency on said view, which is created by a later patch? Brilliant, guys!
At that point I was two hours into the job. I gave up and punted to vendor support, leaving them a pair of voice messages (because I was tired & frazzled, I left out one key piece of data in the first message) and waited for the call back.
And waited. And waited. And… yeah.
Finally I gave up and went to bed, with my phone handy in case vendor support did as I asked: “Call me any time!” Stress kept me awake well past 2am.
Stress got me right back out of bed at 7am, even though I was groggy and cranky. I checked email, I looked at my phone, found nothing and nothing. “Fine,” I thought, “I’ll open a ticket via email.”
Then I received a couple of alerts via email that key services on the machine in question had been restarted. How odd, since I hadn’t been on it yet… so I checked the event logs (Have I mentioned that I love Kaseya? Captured event logs rock.) and oh look! Someone had been working on my server… since 6am!
It was nice of them to call me… OH WAIT.
So by 8am the server was working, and the tech finally called me, but only stayed on long enough for me to answer the question, “Is your server working now?” I couldn’t get any details out of him, nor could I ask why he hadn’t called me when he’d started work so I wouldn’t be left wondering if anyone had heard my message!
Oh well. All’s well that ends… something-something.
