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Looking For Quacks In The Pavement

  • Tomorrow Comes Today

    Nostalgia is a powerful sensation. I woke up at 7:00 this morning in a strange bed. That’s not the nostalgia part, you silly reader you. My hour-long morning jaunt around the quiet golf resort provided me with waves upon waves of homesickness.

    So where’s home, you ask? Good question. I grew up in the wilds of central Washington state. I couldn’t point to a particular town or location and say, “Here is what I think of when I say ‘home’,” but there is a collection of places that figure strongly in my memories of youth.

    Somewhere on the other side of the Columbia river from here is the Lewis River campgrounds. At one point our family was involved in taking care of those grounds, and I have surpringly fond memories of the place. There’s also the Samish Island (really a peninsula) campgrounds. Apparently I spent a lot of quality time at church camping activities. Who knew?

    The resort at which the retreat was held reminded me partly of Lewis River and partly of the Cascade foothills we frequented often when we lived near Brewster, WA. Everywhere you looked there were pine trees, cedar trees, hills and rocks and underbrush. I don’t miss my childhood, but I miss those places. I’m probably not smart or wise enough to resolve this apparent conundrum. Ah well.

    The retreat ended after lunch, so Gary and I took off for the office. I wanted to get the Qualitap issue resolved at long last, and thankfully a fresh CD-ROM was waiting in my mail slot. With that completed and instructions emailed out to the relevant parties, I feel relatively safe in entering my vacation week.

    I am home now. There are rugrats galore, two of which are even mine. Wendi and Bernie leave tomorrow morning. I’ll be babysitting one rugrat on weekdays, and then just Alex and Erica on the weekend. (Having them at home isn’t really babysitting. They’re not babies anymore.) I’ll probably check my work email occasionally, if only to prune the metric ton of spam I get every day. Other than that, I have no plans. I’m tied to the house for a week, so I should just try to make the best of it.

  • 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.

  • I’ll say!

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

  • 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?

  • 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

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