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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.