Following Edge

In the 8 days since writing about the crash, things have been a constant challenge. I've been silent because it's not very entertaining to write about one bad thing after another and I hadn't been feeling positive enough to care about writing.

On Monday evening, the APC Uninteruptable Power Supply that runs the computer room I manage failed a scheduled battery test and turned off the power to all the equipment, including all of our network connections, accounting servers, calendar, email and web servers. The electricity to the room never went off, so it shouldn't have happened. I guess the word "Uninteruptable" was a serious overstatement. Talking to APC, they simply informed me, "No, that shouldn't happen". Thanks.

On Tuesday, I stayed up very late assembling a new server, "nhi", so that I could install it during my trip to Portland on Wednesday. I went to Portland mainly to meet a Covad DSL Installer. After driving over 2 hours and waiting 4 hours, I discovered that the installer determined he hadn't brought the correct paperwork, so wouldn't do the work that day. Since he didn't call me to let me know or enter any information for the company to call me, I wasted hours sitting and waiting, then more hours waiting in rush-hour traffic, arriving home late in the evening. Calling someone if you're unable to make an appointment is a pretty minimal courtesy. I am going to do the installer some serious verbal harm when I do see him. At least, though, I got the new server all assembled and beautifully installed. But...

The next day, Thanksgiving, I enjoyed visiting with friends and family, letting the weeks worries slip away. Ha! Not even! In actuality, our most important server, "trac", went down before 10:00am and my friend Chris and I spent hours of our holiday time until 7:00pm getting things fixed. It turns out that both the server's logic board and power supply went out. To get things running, we had to tear apart the new server I'd installed the previous day, copy all of the data on this massive server to new drives, and do a scary upgrade from Linux 2.2 to Linux 2.4. The good news is that I did get to take an hour off to enjoy Thanksgiving dinner with the family at Judith and Chris' house. It was as wonderful as it could have been, given the chaos and frenzy going on around me.

On Friday, and even now, I am terrifically behind on work due to the backlog from all those distractions and the work to get everything repaired and back in good condition.

Thankfully, I was able to recover my sensibilities and get in a good mood in the last few days. Basically assisted by all of Ian Dury's favorite things, but substituting Vince Guaraldi for Rock and Roll.

The picture shown here is the destruction of the Rite Aid at 29th and Willamette Street in Eugene. (The other picture is the destruction of Thanksgiving dinner, of course.) They're tearing this huge building down to, evidently, build an even bigger one for the PC Market of Choice. Since my parents (both pharmacists) worked there for decades, it's a significant event for me. Lauren and I enjoyed watching the destruction.

Things feeling better now, I hope to write again in just a couple of days.