greyduck.net

Starred Due Valley

Having wandered away from Guild Wars 2 lately, I dabbled with Diablo III for a while until someone sent me a gift on Steam: Stardew Valley.

You may have heard of it.

It’s really working for me. I can farm crops, I can raise animals, I can craft things, I can arrange my domain how I please, there are goals to meet (both “kill X in the mines for a reward” and “bring one each of all these things for a reward”), and some days it’s nice to just run around the farm cleaning up debris. And sometimes the game surprises you.

When life hands you giant melons, reach for your axe…

In the upper left corner you’ll note that I have a duck and a bunny, named Plucky and Harey respectively. (Chickens are named Henri, Etta, Clucky, and so forth.) I am bad at pet names, let’s be honest.

Now, I’m not min-maxing my gameplay. I’m just… having fun. If you’re a casual gamer, Stardew Valley may in fact be an ideal game for you. Possibly.

Of course, every now and then the game gives you the middle finger.

All that gold, no way to reach it because the only exits from my current square are up and out of the mine, or down to the next level…

If you’re on the fence about trying it out, get in touch. Maybe I could be convinced to send it as a gift. That’s how I got my copy, after all. (I turned around and bought copies for Kyla and my daughter, so paying it forward is accomplished.) It’s only $15, and money well spent.

2 April, 2016
Nothin’ On My Plate

On the day I started work with this company almost 10 years ago, I had no tickets assigned.

Once, late last Autumn, I got down to zero tickets.

Welp.

Mind you: I have projects to work on, so I’m not bored by any stretch of the imagination. But still, the Spring Break doldrums seem to be rolling on into early April for some reason…

31 March, 2016
4200 minus 2700 equals Headache

For most of the calendar year so far we at work have been plowing through a massive reorganization, upgrade, and consolidation of our servers. One of the last stages of this consolidation & upgrade process involved upgrading our Kaseya environment. During the shuffle I found some quirks. For instance, the UserProfiles directory contains roughly 4200 subdirectories, one per agent in the system.

Problem is, we only have about 2700 agents. The other 1500? Old agents.

I asked vendor support about this, as the impression I had was that there was an agent archive process. I mean, there’s an archive directory configured in the system, what else is it for if not to archive these agent directories? Heck, the archive directory has agent directories in it.

Apparently, nope. This isn’t something Kaseya does. I must archive those 1500 directories manually. How did the previous archive directory become populated? No idea at all.

“Okay,” you might be saying right now, “Just look for the oldest directories.”

Problem! We just migrated the front-end and database back-end parts of Kaseya to new servers over the last couple weeks! All the directories have brand new dates, all in numerical order, dating from when they were copied off of the old server.

So this is my life now. Comparing the list of directory names with a list of agent IDs from a report, moving anything not in the report into an archive directory, by hand, one by one. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Fun.

24 March, 2016
It’s a Very Monday Monday
This week is getting an early start on kicking my ass:
- Sunday Night Insomnia with a vengeance.
- Remembered to do dishes and take out garbage this morning, forgot to grab lunch.
- MAX train broke down one stop away from where I needed to go. (The operator had to be talked through cycling the breakers. That’s right: They rebooted the light-trail train.)
- BurgerVille’s closed today, so no high-octane breakfast to boost my energy levels.
- Half the office is on vacation or out sick.
- The link between two of our key work systems is broken for no reason I can determine.
Is it too late to throw my hands up and head back to bed? (Yes. Yes, it is.)
21 March, 2016
End of an Era

Post tagged: Site Meta

Farewell, Node1 server.

Long live Node2.

Email has been on Google Apps for a couple weeks now with no problems, websites are all migrated to the new box, and nothing remains of any use on the old system. So, I just turned off and removed the Linode VM of the old server. Had to do it by month’s end or get dinged for another $75, so today was a good day to make that happen.

It’s always a bit of a downer, shutting off a server you worked so hard to build in the first place. But that’s the way of things.

27 February, 2016
WordPress and comment email

Post tagged: Site Meta

I… may have only just a few minutes ago fixed a setting that prevented WordPress (and anything else PHP-based) on this new server from sending email.

Whoops. No comment notifications, for instance.

On the upside, if this is the worst mistake I make throughout this process then I’ve done pretty damned well.

18 February, 2016