prgrmr | it's been a busy, tiring week

And I've actually had a nice three days off. Not at all looking forward to going back to work, particularly because I have to work next weekend too.

Tuesday night we had a semi-planned power outage at work. I say semi-planned because the facilities guy and the HR director who project manages the construction projects (and in her case the "project manager" title is mostly a formality) knew about it for over a month. The rest of the company? We found out about it on Friday. So we in IT had about two and a half business days to plan the shutdown of over 100 servers, the corporate network, and coordinate with the shutdown of systems and networks in three computer labs. Yeah, it was about as much fun as you think.

Three of my systems didn't come back; two weren't set to boot to the OS on power-up, one a Intel box and the other a Sun system which I still have to figure out. The third was a Sun system that lost memory. The network admin from the engineering lab stepped in, help me crack the box and remove memory two sticks at a time to isolate the problem. We got through all 8GB without getting it to boot, but when we gave it one more try with all the memory in, the diags finally id'd the bad sticks and took them out of the config. So problem partially solved, as the system is at least useable. And of course, it's the key system for the software engineers, containing the live Clearcase database. We got out of there about 12:30am.

Wednesday was clean-up from Tuesday with lots of helpdesk tickets to make the time pass; Thursday I was finally able to get back to working on Project stuff, including the migration project that is supposed to go live next Saturday. As tempting as it is to blow the date (and it's outrageously tempting, 'cause I have to commit to it by Thursday), I honestly want to get it done and over with.

So Monday I get to learn how to do patching on Solaris. The actual patch load is easy, there's a "pkgadd" command for that. It's the determining what patches to get, how to find and interpret dependencies and supercedes that's going to be the subject of discovery. Every vendor does it differently, and from poking around on Sun's web site on Thursday, not only are they no exception, they are probably the most different of all that I've seen so far.

But that's tomorrow. I still have 4 hours of my three-day weekend left to enjoy. Friday I took the kids to the Fireworks. Apparently I need to do that every 2-3 years to remind myself how much I hate doing it. The show was ok. The finally was anti-climatic in large part because more than half of what they shot in the final few minutes was at less then half the altitude the most of the previous part of the show was done at.

Saturday I took the Ex and kids grocery shopping. Her Jeep is no longer sitting out back of the service station where she had it towed, and she says she doesn't know why. I told her at the least she has to either report the vehicle stolen to the police and to the insurance company (with appropriate explanations) tomorrow morning. The fact that she has zero paperwork scores a 10 on the B.S. meter. No estimate for repairs, no bill for storage, no "get this POS off my property" letter, no bill from a towing company, nothing. And yes, this is what I get to deal with for having left something for her to deal with.

After shopping, I went to the Barley House for the first time in over a week and enjoyed a salad and a couple of Guinness. And some lemon cello cake, because going out means Go Big or Go Home. The place was dead. There was one couple in the tavern and less than half a dozen people at the bar when I got there, and when I left about 2 hours later, there was still just one (albeit, different) couple in the tavern and maybe 10 folks at the bar. I got a new server, and she did OK, remembering my salad order without having to write down the deletions and dressing substitution. There's also the possibility that I've ordered it often enough that the kitchen staff know how to make it from memory now.

Today I drove Brandon back to school, and then took the little kids to the theater to see WALL-E (Wikipedia entry, spoilers behind the link). Danny quite literally sat on the edge of his seat for the entire thing, which just delighted me to no end, and he was the one I was hyping the movie to for the last month. The girls liked it too; Elyssia was a little fidget the entire time due in part to me being too cheap today to spring for popcorn and soda. But it was at the cheap theater in town and there's no cup holders on the seats and the potential for mess it too high to deal with. However, this is the last time I take the kids there, as the ceiling was missing many tiles and there was an obscene amount of exposed insulation, which I spotted about half-way through the film. (Note to self, call the city code department tomorrow and get the procedure for filing a complaint. No one's kids should have to be exposed to that.)

I have had, for well over a year and possibly two, the DVD of What Dreams May Come, with Robin Williams and Cuba Gooding, Jr. I will be watching it tonight. And then I'll be starting on Umberto Eco: on literature. I picked it up Saturday at Borders when out shopping. Elyssia needed to go potty, so when her mom and brothers and sister when to the grocery store, I walked her across the parking lot to make use of Border's ladies' room and to shop. Elyssia got Curious George and the Hot Air Balloon. While not strictly a cannonical Curious Georage story, she thought it looked fun. :-) I love having a seven year old. I'm going to hate when she grows up--cause I'm still not going to want to.