Saturday, May 26, 2007
Parental consternation
This morning, my husband asks me if I've seen my son's eye. My son had been at the local country fair the night before. I said "Why, is it black?" which my husband confirms.
I got a good look at his face a little later. Not only is his eye black, but there are cuts all over his face. I asked "Who won?". My son says the other guy. "Did he sucker punch you?" I ask. "No, he was just ready to go," my son replies. I tell him not to do it again, and he agrees. Him and his buddies had ended up at a house party, and my son paid too much attention to someone else's girlfriend (it's a small town).
This is one of those situations where the kid thinks he's in big trouble, but you just have to keep your cool as a parent and let them figure it out for themselves. Of course, he'll never hear the end of it.
D.
P.S. He went back to the fair again tonight.
I got a good look at his face a little later. Not only is his eye black, but there are cuts all over his face. I asked "Who won?". My son says the other guy. "Did he sucker punch you?" I ask. "No, he was just ready to go," my son replies. I tell him not to do it again, and he agrees. Him and his buddies had ended up at a house party, and my son paid too much attention to someone else's girlfriend (it's a small town).
This is one of those situations where the kid thinks he's in big trouble, but you just have to keep your cool as a parent and let them figure it out for themselves. Of course, he'll never hear the end of it.
D.
P.S. He went back to the fair again tonight.
Saturday, May 05, 2007
This week at "work"
Here's how the week went:
1) Monday: I caused an MQ QA cluster outage doing some testing.
2) Tuesday: we went out to lunch.
3) Wednesday: I re-investigated a known problem.
4) Thursday: we went out the lunch.
5) Friday: I broke two applications in development.
I couldn't be more productive if I tried.
I've been firefighting on the QA cluster for the last few months. Every two or three weeks, it would go "split brain" and fail over unexpectedly. We blamed it on the VMWare full image backup at first so that was stopped, but the failovers continued and even became more frequent. I finally did what the errors indicated and increased deadtime for the heartbeat (only a circumvention in my opinion). The cluster was stable the following weekend so I decided to make a script LSB compliant that heartbeat had been complaining about. When I tested failover, one of the filesystems wouldn't remount. I rebooted the server but still no joy. I got my new cluster sysadmin involved. He rebooted both servers and the mount worked this time. He also suggested that the heartbeat config might be out of synch which I dismissed (he and I don't always see eye-to-eye). Back at my desk, I had second thoughts so I compared the two haresources files and found a slight discrepancy! This had happened when I had made some changes to try to diagnose the original failover problem. I may have been the author of my own misfortune here.
While out at the first lunch, a bright yellow Porsche Carrera GT parked beside the restaurant. The same sysadmin said it was worth a quarter of million dollars. He was almost drooling over this car. Every guy who went past it stopped to gawk. Some even took pictures with their cellphones. My boss wagged his finger at someone who was looking at it giving the impression it was his. Most women, on the other hand, walked by without even giving it a glance.
Friday's adventures also involved the cluster, but in the development environment. I am trying to migrate one application from its own dedicated queue manager. At first when it didn't work, we discovered that a queue was missing on the mainframe or so we thought. I was dealing with the backup admin who put it back to humour me, and the app worked. When the primary returned from vacation, he informed us that the app was set up for dynamic reply queues on the mainframe side so the queue shouldn't exist. This was news to me, both technically and architecturally. Now, we'll have to figure out how to get it working in a clustered environment. This will probably involve reconfiguring the JBoss Message Driven Bean to which I am just getting my first real exposure.
D.
1) Monday: I caused an MQ QA cluster outage doing some testing.
2) Tuesday: we went out to lunch.
3) Wednesday: I re-investigated a known problem.
4) Thursday: we went out the lunch.
5) Friday: I broke two applications in development.
I couldn't be more productive if I tried.
I've been firefighting on the QA cluster for the last few months. Every two or three weeks, it would go "split brain" and fail over unexpectedly. We blamed it on the VMWare full image backup at first so that was stopped, but the failovers continued and even became more frequent. I finally did what the errors indicated and increased deadtime for the heartbeat (only a circumvention in my opinion). The cluster was stable the following weekend so I decided to make a script LSB compliant that heartbeat had been complaining about. When I tested failover, one of the filesystems wouldn't remount. I rebooted the server but still no joy. I got my new cluster sysadmin involved. He rebooted both servers and the mount worked this time. He also suggested that the heartbeat config might be out of synch which I dismissed (he and I don't always see eye-to-eye). Back at my desk, I had second thoughts so I compared the two haresources files and found a slight discrepancy! This had happened when I had made some changes to try to diagnose the original failover problem. I may have been the author of my own misfortune here.
While out at the first lunch, a bright yellow Porsche Carrera GT parked beside the restaurant. The same sysadmin said it was worth a quarter of million dollars. He was almost drooling over this car. Every guy who went past it stopped to gawk. Some even took pictures with their cellphones. My boss wagged his finger at someone who was looking at it giving the impression it was his. Most women, on the other hand, walked by without even giving it a glance.
Friday's adventures also involved the cluster, but in the development environment. I am trying to migrate one application from its own dedicated queue manager. At first when it didn't work, we discovered that a queue was missing on the mainframe or so we thought. I was dealing with the backup admin who put it back to humour me, and the app worked. When the primary returned from vacation, he informed us that the app was set up for dynamic reply queues on the mainframe side so the queue shouldn't exist. This was news to me, both technically and architecturally. Now, we'll have to figure out how to get it working in a clustered environment. This will probably involve reconfiguring the JBoss Message Driven Bean to which I am just getting my first real exposure.
D.
Thursday, May 03, 2007
Rant of the week: other drivers!
This morning, some woman pulled out in front of me on my concession road. She hadn't bothered to defrost/scrape her windshield so I don't think she could see a thing. She proceeded to drive down the middle of the road at a very slow rate of speed. At the corner, she stops with her signal on and waves me through, but there isn't enough room.
On the expressway, I like to leave a car's length between me and the next guy. Nature must abhor a vacuum because some jerk has to put their car in it. I would love to lean on my horn until they move out of my buffer zone. Bumper to bumper and doing 100 km/hr!
Other drivers not yielding the right of way is a fact of life. What really irks me is drivers who don't take the right of way. Why does someone turning right feel compelled to wave you through your left turn? Just get out of my way!
D.
On the expressway, I like to leave a car's length between me and the next guy. Nature must abhor a vacuum because some jerk has to put their car in it. I would love to lean on my horn until they move out of my buffer zone. Bumper to bumper and doing 100 km/hr!
Other drivers not yielding the right of way is a fact of life. What really irks me is drivers who don't take the right of way. Why does someone turning right feel compelled to wave you through your left turn? Just get out of my way!
D.
Wednesday, May 02, 2007
She's left the building
I found out from the grapevine this morning that the Sr VP eCommerce was no longer in the company employ. The "Sr" was a recent promotion. She was an ex-CLAer.
One of my colleagues saw her getting on the elevator yesterday at lunch with her coat and briefcase. She was with someone who I can only assume was our HR partner.
Her admin assistant must be getting a complex. This is the second boss she's lost this way.
D.
One of my colleagues saw her getting on the elevator yesterday at lunch with her coat and briefcase. She was with someone who I can only assume was our HR partner.
Her admin assistant must be getting a complex. This is the second boss she's lost this way.
D.
