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August's Journal
02/09/2010
[16:55] Unfortunately, I didn't manage to push through a series of patches to
some live servers today on account of not writing a clear enough plan for the
person who I was expecting to present it to the change board.
(Does that sentence make sense? I think it does. You get my drift anyway.)
So, I've had to write a proper plan, which is definitely a good idea and good
practice for me. Hopefully when this is resubmitted to the right people it'll
be passed and I'll get my permission to patch.
It turned out that we hadn't been updating a certain file of codes for over
nine months and no-one had noticed. The fault ended up being upstream of my
area of technical responsibility and we got it fixed fairly quickly once we
noticed. The reason we checked is that the import of the codes into a
database usually never goes flawlessly after the short break we have at this
time of year but it did and that clued us in to the fact it hadn't been
getting a more recent version for nine months. What was even weirder was that
once we'd started getting the up to date file it still imported cleanly! This
despite having been unchecked for so long and over 35% larger than it was when
we last did an import. Weird! Cool, but weird.
I went for a run at lunch. It was hot, I enjoyed it. That's about it. I
think I may do parkrun again on Saturday. I won't plan on breaking 20 minutes
but it would be nice. I'm also not in tomorrow so I can coordinate the second
day of carpet laying upstairs at home. Kris was there today and it all has
apparently gone very smoothly. Tonight is going to be mostly about moving
lots of furniture and other stuff around so the other rooms can be done. I'm
also going to have to unpick all the wiring in the box room, which is going to
be a real chore. This will mean that we'll be without network connectivity
for about half the day, but I think we can cope with that. Kris may go out
anyway so she can get some work done in peace and quiet. Oh, and I'm not in
on Monday or Tuesday either. So no journal then either. Chances are I won't
remember even a quarter of what happens over the next four days so you'll just
have to suffer. I doubt it'll be that bad.
Here's some things to be going on with: the wedding invitations started
arriving and people seem to like them even if the text is a little small on
some of the bits, some people have some really picky food issues, I've still
not been called back by the person who's supposed to be coming to regrout the
bathroom, I'm going to be doing a bit of work from home first thing on Monday
morning, we still need to work out what we're ordering from Ikea and what we
have to go and get because they don't deliver, I'm hungry.
That is all. Have a good few days.
01/09/2010
[17:00] Kind of a mixed bag of things today. There were a number of rather
more in-depth discussions with the web team about the issues we had with a
master/master MySQL database a few weeks ago (which luckily for once I didn't
have the skills to have been involved in trying to fix) when all I wanted to
do was talk about moving some applications off old servers onto new ones.
Then there was the easy scheduling of some RHEL patching, of which some is
going to take place while I'm actually on holiday (but I'll still be doing,
from home). Finally there was some analysis of some SSL alerts we got from
the back end nodes we just added to the load balancers for the new server
we've picked up. After a few minutes we discovered that it was in fact the
"friendly" probing that another part of the institution does which was sending
malformed/incomplete SSL handshakes and causing issues. We've now blacklisted
the service from the point of view of the probe so that it won't happen again
in the future. We hope. We have to hope because apparently the service is
Really Important (more so, apparently, than anything else we run) so it has
to stay up at all times.
To be honest, today's also the day I discovered a little more about what
certain people think about certain other people here than I thought I would.
And certainly more than I think I wanted to.
Having left work early yesterday on account of starting horribly early I went
and got straight on with ripping out the fitted wardrobe in the bedroom. It
wasn't quite as satisfying as I thought it would be and the room certainly
looks a little odd without the big mirrors in there any more, but the damp in
the corner (previously hidden by the side wall of melamine chipboard) isn't
as bad as I thought it would be and I think with a little work, some pliers
for the wall plugs, some polyfiller and some paint I'll be happy to cover the
whole thing up again with a Pax wardrobe system from Ikea (when we eventually
get around to ordering it). The garage is now full of lots of white melamine
coated chipboard, but only two mirrored doors as I was able to give one to the
next door neighbour. Now all we have to do is shuffle all the big furniture
around upstairs for the next two days as tomorrow is the first day of the Big
Recarpeting Job.
Kris is out this evening at yoga and then having dinner with a friend so I'll
be fending for myself and living off a diet of whatever I can find in the
cupboards and four hours of downloaded television.