BOFHJournal - June 2005

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30/06/2005 [12:10] We went storm-chasing last night. Cormac came over ostensibly for us to go climbing but we were all tired and the roads to the climbing wall aren't great to go on when the rain's as heavy as it was. Consequently we settled down to watch Ferris Beuller's Day Off and had a chinese (I tried to go low fat where possible). On the spur of the moment afterwards we dashed out to the Saab (wonderful car) and went storm chasing. This involved us driving into the deep country at safe but enjoyable speeds watching for excellent lightning bolts across the dark sky. Not quite US-style tornado chasing but enjoyable enough to keep us out for over two hours. We saw some great forks and what I thought was more of a ball than a fork, but no-one else saw it. I've been chastised again for not having booked off all of my holiday for this year. It's such a change from my last workplace where they never really bothered to ask. I'm going to try to make an effort to co-ordinate something with Elaine in the next seven days or so and see what we can do about getting some joint time off in September perhaps. I'm intending to do the full 6.5 mile route again at 13:00. It looks like a much cooler day than last time (Tuesday). Hopefully we'll manage it with one less pause today. We're also probably going to go the more 'dangerous' route which should add a little more to the lap. [17:30] The run was really rather good. It absolutely bucketed down while we were running down the side of the major A-road but by the time we were on the smaller B-roads it'd calmed down. We managed easily more than half way before pausing for a few minutes and restarting. All in all we're running well these days. This afternoon I've been rewriting my job evaluation form (everyone has to do one) and trying not to fall asleep. I've done a little more on the disaster recovery document, but not as much as I wanted to. I'll do some more tomorrow after I've taken an E3500 and A1000 (I know, old technology) to one of the other server rooms and got it set up.

29/06/2005 [13:25] Have dealt with our usual Sun engineer coming out to replace the SAN disk that died yesterday morning. Seems like a fairly simple job, it's a shame we can't do it ourselves. I've been thinking about the disaster recovery plans I need to write this morning and am pretty sure I know what I need to do in terms of what extra files need creating and what the sequence of events will be. I'll write it tomorrow when I have time. This afternoon I'm at a technical seminar and won't be coming back, then climbing in the evening. I'm absolutely shattered today. I slept very badly last night and even woke Elaine up because of the nightmare I was having (can't remember it at all). Maybe it was something to do with the torrential downpour and thunder and lightning we had last night too.

28/06/2005 [17:15] Lunchtime saw my running mate and I go for our longest route yet. A blistering 6.45 miles in the sun and wind. I have to say I've not enjoyed myself out on a run in a very long time. We slowed to a walk once or twice but that was because we'd just climbed over a gate or were about to go up a very long hill. I think if we can manage to do it in one go (maybe on a cooler day) we'll be in good shape. For the moment we're going to try and see if we can do it once more this week, probably not tomorrow though. In the meantime we'll probably do a shorter route tomorrow. My best wishes to my ex who is apparently in hospital at the moment with some problems (possibly an infection). It's also her birthday today so my commiserations on that score and I hope she feels better soon. Happy birthday anyway. Today I've been in to town with a v240 to get it racked up in one of the other server rooms. That went swimmingly and I was able to stand out in the sun for fifteen minutes or so waiting for the bus back to base. For the rest of the day I've been installing Perl modules for developers and trying to stay cool. My stomach is also growling a lot due to the fact that Elaine and I are starting a reduced fat period in our eating. This, coupled with the running I'm doing is melting off the extra bits around my middle gently but firmly. With luck I should be back to where I was two years ago (through chronic under/bad eating) and in a lot better shape for it. For now I'm going to go home and help Elaine prepare our evening meal. That is to say, unless I make a mistake and we end up having to have chip butties.

27/06/2005 [17:25] Aside from getting absolutely drenched on the way to the train station on Friday night, the journey to Dunk's was pretty much perfect. Got all my trains perfectly on time and even managed to get ahead of my timetable by walking quickly here and there. Dunk and I spent the evening - after coming back with £200 worth of food from Sainsbury's - organising the house and playing Burnout 3 before chatting about stuff and beginning to watch a copy of Sin City on DVD. For a pirate version is was pretty good quality. So good that I watched it to the end at 02:00 long after Dunk had flaked out and gone to bed. Saturday morning I vacuumed the house after helping Dunk take garden waste to the tip and pick up some garden furniture from Homebase. Elaine and others began to turn up around about midday and by the middle of the afternoon the barbecue was cooking and pretty much everyone was around. The party went on long into the evening and degenerated into poker in one room and watching St Elmo's Fire in the other. At that point I went to bed. Sunday we cleared up pretty much everything, ate lots of bacon and eggs and watched Scrubs until Dunk took Elaine and I to the station. After another OK journey home we collapsed onto the sofa and Elaine slept while I did some housekeeping stuff. This morning I was extremely tired and barely made it to work for 08:30. Despite my tiredness I've been able to do another Sun Studio 10 install, verify that both installations work with the version of Java that's already on the boxes and even actually run 'sunstudio' from my machine. I fear for anyone who actually has to use the IDE though. Ugly piece of... Running at lunchtime was odd. I think I may have had my shoes laced too tightly but by two thirds of the way round the second lap both feet were completely numb with pins and needles. Not painful mind, just very odd. They went away as soon as I stopped. This afternoon I've been looking at the Enermax PSU that one of my running partners is looking to sell me. It's an Enermax Whisper EG465AX-VE unit which is a bit more powerful than the one I got with my Chieftec case. Hopefully it should drop the noise level a bit too.

24/06/2005 [14:40] Lovely weather this morning, turned to torrential rain around 13:00. It's certainly cleared the air, but I can really smell BO in the corridor now. I don't know who it is but it's not pleasant. I've been doing disaster recovery documentation and installing Sun Studio 10 on Solaris 9. I'm unsure as to whether the version of J2SE I have preinstalled is going to be the right one (1.4.2_05 and it's specifying 1.4.2_06) so I'm not going to install the other machine until my co-worker comes back on Wednesday and has a look. Or I may just try the other one in a different manner and see what happens on Monday. I'm set to head to Twyford this evening so I'm going to try and get out of here for about 16:00 today. Between now and then I've got things to do. Excellent barbecue plans for this weekend at Dunk's with drinking and XBox fun this evening when the house is set up. I could probably do with some more sleep but I don't think it's going to happen. Elaine'll be coming down tomorrow morning but I think she's not quite so keen to brave the Friday rush hour, even if I am going in the opposite direction.

23/06/2005 [17:25] It's been hot and humid here today, even with very little cloud cover. We must be due a thunder storm some time soon. Either way today has been a day of excitement, nervousness and general apathy in the heat. First off I attempted to get a definitive list of the machines in one of the server rooms so as to aid my configuration of the UPS client software. I ended up having to ring someone who was at one (luckily) helping a Chubb engineer and have him read the names off the front of the boxen. Just seen this web page on BIG which is both mildly amusing and quite interesting. I managed to do something definitive on eBay today and actually place a Buy Now order for the monitor I want. The seller looks reputable, he's certain he'll have the thing in stock by the 30th and I haven't paid him any money yet. Now I just have to watch and wait and hope. There's really not a lot happening in this heat. I went running again at lunch time. It must have been at least 30 degrees Centigrade outside at the time. Still haven't managed to kill myself yet, which is a good thing. My line manager/lead finally made it back into work today after coming down with a very bad case of labyrinthitis about five weeks ago. She seems in fine fettle (probably due to not thinking about work for so long) and aside from a short meeting tomorrow should be back in on reduced time from next Monday. This is good as my coworker isn't in tomorrow or Monday or Tuesday of next week. Once again I'm on my own. I think I should probably go home now and be somewhere cool for a bit.

22/06/2005 [16:55] Thus far today I have started a RHEL3 workstation install, run four miles in the blazing midday heat, kickstarted two Sun v240s (including cleaning up some confusion with scripts), drunk a lot of water and wished I was outside in the sun. Other than that very little has happened today. It's so hot here that no-one is really doing anything constructive. I feel vaguely pleased that I even got a list of the current machines registered as using the UPS in one of our geographically divergent server rooms. There's not a whole lot more I can do today... oh, I replaced an SSL certificate and put some more stuff in motion with regard to getting some other ones sorted out. The weather is truly gorgeous at the moment. Not only that but the hedge didn't look to bad this morning in the cold (initially!) light of day. That and the ants hadn't come back and hopefully won't again unless something changes. I really should finish off configuring this new linux workstation and head off for some climbing.

21/06/2005 [17:30] Rather a non-entity of a day today. It was hot again last night so Elaine had trouble sleeping. As a result I had trouble sleeping too. I've been pretty tired today. Luckily pretty much nothing has happened today. I did manage to solve an issue with SSH and keys that worked on one server but didn't on another because of the paranoid settings that SSH daemons have when it comes to group permissions on users home directories. There's a simple fix that I'm one hundred percent sure will work, but I can't implement it because we're in a service-orientated organisation and a potential break in service would be Bad. As a result the five minute job is going to take on the order of one to two weeks unless someone pulls their finger out. I'm ready to do what's required, I just have to wait for someone to do what's required of them. I was very close to buying a monitor from the US via eBay this morning until I had a conversation with Her Majesty's Revenue & Customs who informed me that if the thing was tagged there'd be fourteen percent Duty to pay on the price, and then VAT to pay on the price plus the fourteen percent. Not as tempting any more. I think I have another place to get one from though. I just have to wait a few more days. [17:35] Oh, forgot to mention that Cormac brought over his electric hedge trimmers last night and I spent a solid two and a half hours brutally chopping back the leylandii that borders the front (only) garden. While it's a lot shorter now, it does have a bit of a "just joined the army"/raw recruit look to it now. Still, shouldn't need doing for a while. Also, when we got up this morning there'd been a major invasion of ants under the front door, into the kitchen and up the back of the bin. This took a little while to contain and required some minor genocide. Still, we were here first. I think I should go home and see if they've made a repeat appearance.

20/06/2005 [17:40] What an absolutely stunning weekend was had. Saturday turned out to be a wonderfully warm and sunny day as Elaine and I took a bus and a train to Peterborough to see Andrea who's laid up with a damaged knee. We spent some time in town there looking for clothes for the upcoming wedding of my ex and managed a few purchases. After that we walked to Andrea's, watched some athletics and then made with the chairs and tables from the shed and Anna's (a next door neighbour) garden. After a while Veg turned up and we had a long and very interesting talk about fighters, his job and gliders. With luck I may get to go up in one at some point but I know how busy he is so don't expect it to be for A While. Once Keith turned up we could get on with cooking the food on the barbecue and for a time all we did was eat and drink and chat. Eventually Elaine and I left for the train in total daylight (I love long summer days) and got home around about midnight. Sunday was so hot we spent it out in the garden relaxing, watching the washing dry and trying not to burn. I finally finished "A Deepness in the Sky" and started on the end of "The Centauri Device" but was thwarted by the completely different writing styles. To break up the day I cycled to Tesco for some picnic-style food for dinner so we weren't eating hot food. Other than some more lazing about in the evening Sunday was fairly empty, in fact with the lazing about it was still empty. Just what we needed to be honest. The only problem was that the weather was so hot we didn't get much sleep last night so consequently were both knackered this morning. This didn't matter too much to me as I'm finally able to say I'm on top of the mod_perl+Apache compile issue I was dealing with on Friday. That, coupled with the HTML::Mason success (almost, Apache::Test is still being a bugger) means I'm this >< close to cracking a solid build for the web team. Now that I think I've sold my monitor (for a measily £175, but it's £175 better than nothing) I think I can justify buying that Dell TFT I've been lusting after. I just wonder how long it'll be before it arrives. I bought a second-hand grass rake today from a news group and coupled with Cormac coming over this evening with his electric hedge trimmers I should be able to get my leylandii back under control before they either eat my garden or get me a fine from the council.

17/06/2005 [17:10] I'm not even going to try and detail what I've done today. Suffice it to say I think I now have a working Apache/1.3.33 mod_perl/1.29 installation working with the bespoke authentication module. Don't even ask me how I did it because to be honest I don't really know. One of the positive aspects of this is that I now seem to be able to install HTML::Mason fairly easily. Which is kind of the whole point of this stressful last two days. It's been very hot and humid today, I worked through lunch and I'm very tired. I should have picked up a book from someone in town but was so deeply in the thick of things that I didn't notice lunchtime was over until 14:30. My head is full of Makefile.PL and ./configure lines and I don't really have the brain power to do anything more today so I'm going home and having a nice cool shower. I think part of the reason I'm so tired today is that I was the only person in the office again so I was responsible for killing all the runaway print jobs this morning (which is hard to do when the documentation is a bit sketchy in places) and doing installs of COBOL (really, don't ask) on live machines. All in all, I'm pooped.

16/06/2005 [18:35] Does anyone want to buy an Iiyama Vision Master Pro 510 22" CRT? I'm thinking about £200 but may be convinced to go lower. It's capable of 1600 x 1200 / 85 Hz and has been since I bought it a few years ago. Never a moment's trouble, in perfect condition. Takes BNC and D-SUB inputs (BNC cable comes free with it, also a few Windows PC games if you want). Of course it weighs 33.1kg and you'll have to come and collect it yourself, but other than that I think this is a really good deal. Surely someone wants a large, crisp Trinitron-a-like screen for CAD, Photoshop etc.? Otherwise I've been dealing with stupid Sun versions of SSH and refused keys. I really don't know what's going on there. On top of that I must have spent about two hours diagnosing more about the Internet Explorer for Macintosh SSL errors that "no-one's been reporting to us for months but apparently has been affecting lots of people" problem. Seems that when you use a stone age browser like IE 4.5 the SSLCipherSuite directive in Apache must not include 56bit export ciphers. Of course this means that no browser can use them which is a bit shit, but there you go. Hopefully my turning on of agent logging will give us some statistics to bandy at people along with the recommendation that running a browser that came out in January of 1999 isn't such a good idea. Of course now I'm fighting with HTML::Mason again. My old adversary when dealing with RHEL3 and it's stupid versions of mod_perl and Apache2. This could take a while...

15/06/2005 [16:30] No joy on selling my CRT as yet. I really can't afford to buy this new one until the other one's gone and this month's pay cheque comes in, just in case the Customs people take an interest in the thing and the cost goes way up. All the items on eBay appear to expire this time tomorrow so it may all become academic at that point if new identical items aren't put up. I think I mostly solved the issues I was having yesterday. The actual development machine that's going to take XML::Validator::Schema is also going to have Interchange on it as well. Turns out this doesn't play well with threaded Perl so the (threaded) Perl 5.8.0 on a standard RHEL3 box isn't going to work. As a result, rather than roll my own Perl 5.8.0 RPM, I went with CPANing in 5.8.7 and installing it cheek-by-jowl with 5.8.0. This has the advantage of being maintainable from my point of view and doesn't spread Perl droppings all over /usr/local. Of course the Interchange RPMs are expecting you to have installed your un(non?)threaded Perl in /usr/local so two symlinks are required to make things happy again. And of course you can't install Interchange from RPM without the --nodeps flag unless all the requisite Perl modules were installed from RPM rather than via CPANing in Bundle::Interchange and/or Bundle::InterchangeKitchenSink. As a consequence I don't actually know if the installation is going to work one hundred percent. However, it's on there it starts and stops without errors and I think I know how to do it again. All I need to do now is wait for the developers to tell me if it, MySQL, Tomcat, Java, about fifty varied Perl modules and Apache all work correctly together and I can incorporate it into my build scripts. Today was a Brown Bag Day. This means rather than running at lunch time (which, even though I'm very tired, would have been preferable) everyone had to troop into one room, eat free lunch (TANSTAAFL) and listen to two people drone on about what they do with their working day. I spent most of the time eating and working out why the laptop/LCD projector were giving offset images. Possibly climbing this evening, may be kiting, will be relaxing eventually whatever happens.

14/06/2005 [18:20] I've been defeated by XML::Validator::Schema. I can find no way to get it to install under a vanilla Perl 5.8.0 as installed by RHEL3. Of course someone on another machine has completely broken things by installing 5.8.6 as well and of course it installs perfectly well on there, thus undermining my 'stick to the RedHat packages' methodology for ease of redoing machine and generally remaining under support. I'm fed up of stuff that doesn't work and doesn't suggest any way to actually fix it. I wouldn't mind if it was broken utterly but perhaps mentioned what I might do to fix things. I ran to town and back at lunch time as my running partner was off ill and I had some stuff to pay into the bank. I've managed to sell my Palm Tungsten T and ultra thin keyboard. I won't embarass myself on here by... no I will. I ended up selling it all for £50 which is shockingly low in my opinion but was probably all I could get for it. I still need to sell my monitor if I'm going to be able to afford this new monitor without breaking the bank in any meaningful way. I've put the advert up and now await some, few or no responses (probably asking me to lower the price somewhat). In a fit of sponteneity last night and as Cormac was round we went to a new all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet place. The food was pretty good, the place nearly empty and the Teppenyaki chef efficient but not showy. I don't think they made much profit from us given we drank mostly water and managed at least seven courses. Of course on rolling home we fell into bed and slept like the dead. And speaking of which, I should roll home too.

13/06/2005 [18:10] I think I ran too quickly on my first lap at lunch today and so wasn't particularly quick on the second one. Still at least I got both done again. I've potentially solved two problems today (although one was concerned with my last work place) through the use of my brain. This is something of a rare event and should be noted. I think I've managed to find a buyer for my old Palm Tungsten T and ultra slim keyboard. I'm only getting £50 for the whole deal but it's better than having it sitting there not being used at all. If I can manage to sell my CRT then I should be a lot happier about getting that Dell TFT without a) adversely affecting my bank balance and b) having a spare 22" CRT just sitting around. I have an extremely leaky application slowly, oh so very slowly, bringing one of my servers to its knees. It's not swapping, yet. But it will, count on it. I've notified those people whose job it is to deal with things like this but I imagine the short term solution will involve quick usage of my stop/start scripts. For the moment though I'm going to go home.

10/06/2005 [10:35] While prodding through this morning's email I came across a reference to cheapish Dell TFT monitors. Interested I took a look at eBay for prices and came across these sellers who appear to be doing very good deals on the Dell UltraSharp 2405FPW 24" Flat Panel Monitor (to give it its full name). I've not bought anything from eBay before so I'm a little concerned when it comes to DOA purchases or what happens in the event of a return, etc. Do these look like good deals? What's the catch? All I would need to do is sell my 22" Iiyama VM Pro 510. I have no idea how much to ask for it. [16:30] Well, I ended up going for a run in the end. As my regular running mate had decided not to go I was very close to not going myself, especially when I couldn't find any documentation for Resin 2.1.16 (Caucho seem to think that everyone'll have moved to 3.x so seem to have dumped their older stuff) and it doesn't look like any of the Resin logs are rotating. This isn't much of a problem but I really would like to keep the logs under control now everything else is shiny and new. Anyway I went for a run and blitzed yesterday's lap times. I'm not sure I was good for much afterwards mind you, but it was good to know that I'm still capable of pushing things sometimes. I'm no closer to selling my CRT at the moment, this is probably for the best. Come the end of the month I'll re-evaluate and see where I stand. For now I'm going to be pleased there was hot water to shower with today (the reason I went running in the end), be annoyed that the air conditioning unit outside our window has been making an annoying noise all day and close down my sessions for the weekend. Hopefully going to watch some excellent climbing movies this evening and then head home for two days of relaxation. Although knowing me I'll be stir crazy by Saturday lunchtime and need to do something.

09/06/2005 [17:40] I'm slowly getting tireder and tireder with this lunchtime running thing but I can also feel myself getting a tiny bit fitter every day. Of course the shower's still not fixed so after a run in the midday heat an ice cold shower probably isn't the best thing to have, but it sure does get the sweat off. A new Sun rack arrived today. Naturally it was too tall to fit in any of the doors so it had to be carried through them all on its side. Co-worker and I have spent the last hour or so setting it up (it was bolted to its pallet and was most annoying to release). Other than that we've been discussing how to deal with the continued and potentially long-term absence of our team leader who's still out of action with an inner ear infection which is affecting her balance, among other things. This may entail a lot more work for me in the near future, but things have been fairly easy for a while so I'm due to get my head down for a bit. Otherwise the weather is great, the birds are singing outside the window and in a few minutes I'll be heading home to watch some DVDs with friends and eat pizza.

08/06/2005 [18:15] "Tomcat", or "How I Learned To Stop Compiling From Source and Use A RHEL Software Channel". Yes it's been a day of worrying about current versions of Tomcat, slotting them into RHEL3 installations and the kinds of things it'd do to my build scripts what with all the requirements for Sun JRE/JDK versions of 1.5.0 and not the standard tried and tested 1.4.x ones. However, in a search for RPMs of Tomcat I stumbled across a fairly up to date one in one of the RHEL child channels. With a bit of fiddling and some extra RPMs to delete afterwards (why RHN thinks I need two versions of the IBM JRE I don't know) I think I've sorted it so that there's a version of Java (Sun's) for the UPS software and a version for everything else. Other than that I've built two machines, prepared another and generally gotten a handle on a whole load of other things. I think for the moment I'm on top of my tasks. That's not to say that I don't have a crapload of documentation to write, but then everyone does. Apparently no climbing this evening (which is good because I'm knackered from my run at lunch time) so Elaine's come here to be shown around the place.

07/06/2005 [17:50] Went running at lunchtime with a guy from Networks. We estimate badly that the route we're doing is something in the region of four miles. Hopefully we'll start doing it every day and not be quite so pooped as we were at the end of today's jaunt. Things have been progressing on the server builds front. All five are now either live, in testing or fully plugged in and have had their RAID arrays initialised. This means all I need to do now is some building, fiddling with Apache, Tomcat, PHP, Sun's JDK, etc., etc. So, not much really. Seriously it should only require a few extra tweaks to the kickstart scripts for two machines, some extra lines to the post install scripts and then the developers telling me what post installation configuration they do. Some of it may not be easily added to the install scripts, but hey, nothing's perfect. Elaine sounds absolutely shattered today. I'm a little worried she's more than just tired, but hopefully we'll be able to have some kind of holiday some time soon. According to the timetable I have here it won't be any time before the eighth of July though as I'm booked up doing a new installation setup for the entire Institution which is going to be extremely complex and I'm the lead sysadmin on it! Happily the lead DBA guy is immensely solid skills-wise so the chances of anything going wrong are slim to none. My coworkers are also likely to lend a helping hand too. So I'm sure it's going to be fine. It will be my first production server jumpstarts though. Well, it's the end of another lovely day here at BOFHcam Central and I'm off home to deal with a mountain of washing up and watch some television. With luck I'll have a build to do tomorrow and whole load of script editing. Always fun.

06/06/2005 [11:35] Already this morning I've had emails from both power supplies in the main SAN saying there's something going on and we don't know what, there was a power glitch last night and the UPS seems to have coped but something odd is going on there. One of the DNS servers wasn't happy with the glitch even though it's on the UPS, the backup duplication to the offsite location has been failing since Saturday morning, one of my colleagues is still ill and the other has reported himself as ill agains this morning too and I'm still really tired. I have to be honest with you, I'm seriously considering coffee. [16:30] I managed to avoid coffee narrowly and have been able to sort pretty much everything out (or at least pass them on to someone else to deal with). As a result Big Brother is currently clear, the backup duplication has been done (manually) and the other two main UPSes for the organisation are now singing from the same hymnbook, even if one of them has a failed monitor module and doesn't actually say what it's doing at the moment. Either way they're far better than the stupid MGE one we have here. I'm off to give blood in a few minutes (third time lucky) and then head home.

03/06/2005 [15:35] An empty day. Seriously. Apart from my lunch falling out of my bag as I was running to work (thus necessitating me not running the rest of the way if I didn't want muller rice all over my clean work clothes) nothing happened. As a result I'm going home. Co-workers weren't in today. One still ill, the other has the flu. Oh, last night I went to a leaving do for Alex at another Thai place. Gorgeous food, portions a bit small. What else? Erm, having a quiet weekend cleaning the house, watching some DVDs and generally relaxing with Elaine.

02/06/2005 [16:55] Elaine and I went to an absolutely wonderful Thai restaurant pretty much straight from work. There wasn't anyone else in the place and the service was relaxed, attentive and speedy. I can't recommend it highly enough to those people who know where I live. Anyway, once we'd finished up and were back in the open air we decided to walk home rather than cycle. We followed some of the same route I took Elaine down the first time she came to see me and we spent some time looking at the architecture of some of the buildings. It's funny, I've been around many of them for years now and only since I've been with Elaine have I begun to see some of the more subtle aspects of their design and where they could have been so much better. Eventually the light began to go so (as we had no lights) we cycled home quickly and spent the rest of the evening relaxing on the sofa. For some reason my iPod had decided to play up as I was running home (I think the shaking isn't so good for it) so I wasn't feeling too good about small bits of electronics when suddenly, as I was sitting at home, Elaine's Nokia 6310i which she'd lent to me just powered down. No idea why. I put it on to charge and went to bed. This morning it was still dead so at lunch time I took it to an Orange shop but they said there wasn't anything they could do. As I met Elaine and Andy and Co. at lunch I passed it over to Elaine to take to a Nokia repair shop near her workplace where they think they may be able to do something with it some time after the 13th, so we'll see. Today I've mainly been documenting the UPS procedures for the MGE UPS as well as working out what the hell the developers are doing with Link Scan and my freshly installed servers. I think we're well behind the curve with regard to getting these servers out of the door and into service, but it's hard to keep things moving sometimes. I'm kind of twiddling my thumbs at the moment as there's another leaving do this evening at 19:00 and it's easier for me to go straight from work than go home first and then cycle all the way back into town again.

01/06/2005 [16:00] Bitch of a day. Really didn't want to get up this morning but did in the end because, well, you have to really. Not only did my new iPod die again on the way home last night (I blame running), my mobile also died when I was in the middle of deleting a SIM update. It still wasn't working this morning. I've used the SIM in another mobile since, had the battery off, etc. and it still refuses to work. It powered off without warning, responds to the charger but whenever you press the power button the screen flickers very slightly four times and then just sits there. Most annoying. Anyway, once in work I've been trying to keep up with the mess the web developers are getting into with Link Scan. The one developer who knows what he's doing with the application is away this week so it's the blind leading the blind at the moment. Other than that I've been helping my colleague strip our Sun rack (apparently of model name "DELOREAN", which I found amusing given the sheer amount of stainless steel which seems to have gone into its construction) which was full of A1000, D1000, A3000 units filled with shockingly small 9GB disks. Next to it in the office at the moment also blocking out all sunlight is a Sun 6500 with 21 CPUs. This too is due to go away very soon because frankly it just eats power, puts out enough heat to melt a glacier and really isn't very goo for much these days. But the most important thing about today is that it's the second anniversary of Elaine and I being together. Well, it might have been yesterday, neither of us are completely sure to be honest. Given the fact that Elaine had a monster headache yesterday we're going to say it's today so that the meal we're having this evening is all the more enjoyable. We'll be going to a lovely little Thai place near the river after work and then either heading home or going for a walk around the same places we did two years ago. Life has changed spectacularly in the last two years. I'm doing things I was only dreaming about and not doing things that I thought would be. It all goes to show that you really cannot predict most of what goes on in your life and all you can really do is ride the wave and make a few vague course corrections now and again to keep from wiping out. The rest of the time? Have fun and admire the view. Currently I'm looking forward to the next two years and wondering just how things are going to go from here...