the day from hell that ended well
yesterday was a crazy day. I had planned to sleep in a little and attend a book discussion about privacy and data security at 10am in Eagan (@Thompson West). For some crazy reason, I woke up early (6:30). I decided to check on one of the servers I’d been having problems with at work. Sure enough the stupid thing kernel-paniced and was dead…so I decided to run into work early. I got in to work at 7:50 and rebooted the server. Then I realized that I had an 8:30 meeting that I had forgotten about (good thing I came in early!). I skipped out early on the meeting and drove down to Eagan. After spending a half hour looking for open parking, I finally found a spot about 300 yards from the main entrance. Of course, I went in the wrong door, but the security guard was nice enough to let me walk through the building unescorted! His comment was “you two look like a couple of honest guys” referring to my coworker and myself…hahahaha…sucker!
The privacy/data security discussion was fairly interesting but it was really just a ploy by Thompson West to pimp their book which “covers everything you’d ever want to know”…yeah, sure. After the discussion, I drove back up to Roseville and arrived around 12:15. My friend Aaron had asked me to come with to do a beta deployment of the knowledge management tool his company has been building so I skipped lunch and ran downtown with him. Things took a bit longer than we expected but we got everything setup and were out the door by 2:30. I got back to work and got caught up on a few things. An alarm on one of our servers was going off nonstop and driving me absolutely crazy. I decided to run home, grab a quick bite to eat, and come back to work at about 6:00 to swap out hardware. About 2 blocks from home, our PM called me and asked if I had forgotten about the 4:30 meeting! 4:30 meeting!? I didn’t see that one coming! Thankfully, the guy we were meeting with was running late so I shoveled in half a plate of food and headed back to work again. Our meeting got done at about 6:00 at which point I had to start working on the server. I thought a drive was going bad so I dd’d 9GB of data onto a spare drive (which took 30 minutes). It turns out, it wasn’t a bad drive at all. I couldn’t figure out what was going on so I yanked the drives and put then in another identical box…problem solved.
At this point, it was 8:00 and I was supposed to be up at a friends house at 7:00! I drove up north (35E & County J) and hung out with a few of the old bethel boys for a while. I took off for home at about 9:30. Matty called on the way home and asked if I wanted to stop at Morts for a few minutes. GREAT IDEA! I got home, took off my stupid dress clothes and met him at Morts at 10. This is where the night changed course. There were a few hippie-types hanging out at a table close by but I didn’t pay much attention to them. Suddenly, I look at the window and see them outside standing in a circle kicking their legs around! holy crap! a game of hack! I pretty much darted outside (telling matty i’d “be right back”) and asked to join in. It was one of the better circles I’ve been in, but of course there’s always the guy who’s never seen a dirt/sand hack before…hhahaha. We played for a 15-20 minutes and it was just what I needed. After that, some girl asked if we’d play foosball against her and her boyfriend. They were all about “playing by the rules”, for instance, the ball couldn’t hit any other player…bahahaha, we kicked their butts.
I finally got home at midnight and crashed hard. It was a super long day and I’m pretty exhausted today…the good thing is, the bosses are gone for the rest of the week and today is Server Monitoring Day…which means I’m gonna install Nagios (thanks for the recommendation, Aaron).
alright, back to work…later