Category Archives: Geek stuff

Reading, no writing, and arithmetic

I always wondered about “The Three Rs: reading, writing, and arithmetic” and why they were called The Three Rs when only one of the words begins with an R. Was it a pirate’s turn making up rules that day? Did the pirate work in an office with a bunch of teachers and won the office pool that day? “There’s three arrrrs, I tell you: rrrrreading, wrrrriting, and arrrrithmetic.” Then the pirate slams back a mug of grog and invites everyone to the ship for some rrrrum.

Anyhow, I have been doing quite a bit of reading, as one might tell from the reviews starting to pop up on this here blog. There are some people who will say it’s just refilling the creative well, but really it’s just something I can do between flurries of activity in the server migrations we’re doing. Fortunately, I read incredibly quickly and always have, so I’ve been pounding down books – mostly mysteries, as that’s my jam these days – courtesy of ARCs (advance reading copies) I get from publishers. In return, I do reviews of those books, on Goodreads and on Amazon when the books are released. I figured as long as I’m doing the reviews, I might as well stick them on the blog as well.

No writing: no real time. I know the old “If you want to write, you’ll find the time” but most of the things we’re doing with migrations is all hands on, with just brief periods  in between the various things that have to happen to get the migrations of done. Fortunately, as we approach nine months of non-stop migrations, we are reaching the end, so it isn’t as hectic. The next couple of servers we’ll start Monday. Between now and then, I’m working on mail-related stuff. It’s mostly to make my life easier, and give me some time back that would otherwise be spent on mail. Between this and the end of migrations, which is so close I can feel it, and with the addition of not doing a garden this year, I’ll probably be able to have some uninterrupted/unbusy time to get some writing done. I hope.

Arrrrrrithmetic: counting down to when the migrations will be done and over with, really, and counting the number of servers left to migrate. It will be nice to get that number to zero. Then we can sit back and say: we did it.

I hope all is good with you, peeps, and until next time: be well.

NOC, NOC

Who’s there?

Har har. I crack myself up, truly.

Another wee hours visit to the NOC to deal with someone’s server, and then again this afternoon to move a couple PDUs and set up a few more servers. This is my life right now: sleep (well, maybe), work work work work work, eat at some point, sleep.

What seem to be the only interruptions are trips  to visit doctors. Two more this month, one of which is back to the neurologist to try botox injections for these terrible headaches/migraines I’ve been having, and for a muscle on the left side of my face that keeps spasming and locking itself down, hard. It’s all very painful, and I hope it works. Certainly my liver would be happier if I wasn’t guzzling (figuratively speaking; it all goes  through the tube) Tylenol and ibuprofen.

The weather here is seriously weird. We’ve had exactly one overnight where we got a freeze, and that just to 30F, although we’ve had two handfuls of days where the highs were only around 60F or so. Now, we’re back in the 80s and the air conditioning keeps coming on now and again – it’s supposed to be in the mid-80s until Friday, an entire week of unseasonably warm temperatures here.

Speaking of temps, I’ve found that thanks to a combination of being sick for years and some of the meds I have to take, when it’s warm outside, I have some issues. I need to get myself acclimated to the heat again, especially because I intend to go back to gardening in 2021.

It appears the Titans went to Baltimore ready to play tonight. It helps that Derrick Henry is a beast and Lamar Jackson is not looking like an MVP tonight.

Just some random thoughts banging around in my head. Now: off to finish all the software installs on the new servers. Until next time, peeps: be well.

A quarter of cleanup

The first quarter of 2020 is going to be a cleanup quarter. We’ve been busting ass for six months making our changes that are a result of our vendor’s changes, and boy, how I would love to be done with this by the end of Q1.

We’re also rearranging things at the NOC; another batch will be done tomorrow, and then this weekend a biggie (even though it only involves one switch). I can hear it now: the plaintive cries of people wondering what happened because they didn’t read any of the announcements we posted ahead of time.

It’s fine. We’re used to it.

Thus far, my primary exercise in the new year has been hauling servers around and taking inventory – necessary but tedious things. But I know the maxim is: do the hard thing first. This is the hard thing right now, and the sooner it’s done, the sooner we can move along back to our usual, quiet support levels, and the other things we (I) want to do.

I keep thinking about the garden, and growing peppers, and telling myself to just grow some tabascos in buckets. That way, I don’t have an excuse to go hog wild out there, and while we can buy cayenne and paprika powder at the store, my mom is not a fan of the actual Tabasco brand. She says it has a bit of a metallic taste at the end. So, I think I’m going to slow my roll on getting caught up back in the great outdoors and not letting the gardens or myself rest, and just set up a bucket brigade – peppers, versus water.

I do have some bamboo plants I would like to get in the ground this year, though. I could focus on digging some holes and working in some good soil. Maybe that will quench the need to get my hands really dirty in the great outdoors. I got them oh, maybe four months ago? All but one have generated new growth. They grow incredibly fast, which is good, because the house going up on the lot diagonally to us is not just large, but toward the front of the property, and I’d rather not be looking at that when out on my front porch. Every other house in this limited development, including mine, sits back from the road. Not a fan of where they’ve placed it, although I suspect the neighbor to his west (the eastern lot is not yet developed) is even less of one. Who knows, maybe I’ll start a bamboo trend in the neighborhood. It’s clumping bamboo, not spreading, so never fear, dear readers: I am still a good neighbor in that regard. Next up is blocking out the neighbor to my south along that fenceline so I don’t have to look at his heavy timber trucking equipment when I’m out at the bees or in the rear garden.

First things first, though, and that is to get all the tech stuff that needs to be done, done. It’s been a weird six months, but the one good thing is that I had the Big Op a month and a half before that vendor got crazy. If I’d had to deal with this while immediately recovering from that, it would have been a nightmare.

Forward, ho! And until next time, peeps: be well.

In the wee quiet hours

“Nothing good happens at 3 AM.”

Probably not entirely true, but it seems to be the time – thereabouts – when shit happens in IT.

Case in point: yesterday. I was winding down for the day, somewhere around midnight-ish, dealing with some guy who was dithering on a backup restore after one of his developers apparently hosed something. He ultimately decided against it, as whatever it was got worked out. Shortly thereafter, after about 1:15 in the morning, one of the servers just went offline. Poof!

We’ve seen this from time to time over the years, where the primary NIC (that’s network interface card, for those of you who do not speak Geek)  shuts itself off. There are a variety of fixes, or possible fixes for it, as with anything. Usually, rebooting the thing bring it back online. That depends on the PDU (power distribution unit, AKA, fancy power strip that allows remote reboots) working. We have probably six that need to be replaced, as they are errored out and do not work for anything other than just plain old power – hence the fancy power strip moniker I’ve given them. This, alas, was one of them.

So I had to haul myself to the NOC at 1:30 in the morning, only to get there and find that the errored PDU just shut off the outlet. And only that one outlet. Easy enough to fix by swapping it to another, working PDU. Then the drive home. In bed by 4. Up again by 8. Work work work. It really puts a crimp in your day.

Some days are like that in IT. Just so anyone who thinks it’s all glamorous and files transfer in nanoseconds and no one ever makes a typo and who may think IT is just super cool and easy money doesn’t get any wrong ideas about it all.

That’s it for now. Until next time, peeps: be well.

Day two of the rest of your life

Far too much football and stuff going on to post yesterday.

But from today forward, I’ll be posting daily – mainly to get in the habit of doing it, and also to vaguely complain about shit. I’m kidding. Sort of.

I’m anticipating the good outweighing the bad, although the first quarter will still be migration city, like living on the LA freeways during rush hour for three months.

There are half a dozen books lined up for me to read and review, so I’m using that as my break time to get my head out of the servers for just a short while. Since I read so quickly, I’ll also need to line up the next six, as I’ll finish this first batch by midweek, even with work being nutty. I love Kindle Unlimited and ARCs (advance reading copies), There’s something to be said for being a voracious reader and being able to put together 500-ish words in a review with a short turnaround time for books coming out in just a few months. I’ll admit I’m amazed at some of the stuff that gets published, though, in the very same way I’m amazed that Lifetime can make the same movies over and over (and over and over) and get rave commentary from its base. Someone very cynical could likely create their own cottage industry on the formula for those movies. i wonder how much they pay…..

That’s it for now. i have someone’s PHP script to check and books to read. Until next time, peeps: be well.

What can I say?

Except that there are people on this planet who, had evolution worked differently, would be eaten by feral bears. And some of them deserve it.

Let me give anyone who stumbles across this site some advice from your friendly tech support people. You are not helping yourself if you become hysterical. You are not helping yourself when you do not answer the questions we’re asking, or make answering those questions a long, drawn out affair, requiring us to ask you the same questions in a slightly different manner so you will shit out another clue for us. You are not helping yourself by claiming you’re losing a billion dollars per nanosecond because the application on your site hasn’t been updated in literally a dozen years and it’s broken – keep in mind that we can see the amount of traffic your site receives, and you’re lying to us, to make it appear your site is insanely popular when it isn’t. If it were, you’d be spending a lot more on it. As it stands, you probably spend more on coffee over the span of two days than you do for your site per month, so let’s try to keep things in perspective here.

You are not helping yourself by pretending you know more than we do about the servers or connections or pretty much any other thing involved in this. Remember: you contacted us for help. If you know so much, why didn’t you fix it yourself, and leave us be to clear the firewall because someone else can’t connect the logic dots of going from “let me pound away, trying to log in over and over when it’s failing” to “I can’t access anything” and who then proceed to inquire as to whether the servers are down or not. Because the likelihood of them understanding things is probably right around the likelihood of you fixing your own stuff, instead of us ignoring everything beyond “I have this error” and fixing whatever it is that’s broken.

There’s a reason people burn out on tech support. That up there is part of it. Don’t do that.

Until next time, peeps: be well.

Rest day


It’s been a very busy week at the ranch: an employee on vacation, new bees arriving, someone hosing their server, planting out, along with all the other everyday, normal things that make life tick around here.

The server issue took about 40 hours to recover, plus another 10-ish to iron out little things – it was that bad, from an admin standpoint – so I’ve been running on less sleep than normal. That’s ok. In a couple of weeks I’l be taking a 6-8 nap during the daytime.

I’ve got the broccoli, some of the onions, and a flat of tomatoes out of the barn and into the rows. I intercropped onions and broccoli, and put some carrots (from seed) with the tomatoes. That leaves five flats in the barn and half a flat of onions and leeks hanging out in front garden south, awaiting their places. Plus the seeds I’ll sow directly (cukes) and the flats to start the melons so they can be set out (although I may very well just say screw it, and sow them directly, too).

The Buckfast bees – a variety new to me, as I’ve only had Italians to this point – seem to be super chill bees. They were not particularly bothered by much of anything I was doing, even when I had to shake the packages. Even at that point, some of them didn’t rocket out of the packages to come at me (bro!) and just stayed in the package, hanging out. I’m working on editing video of one of the installs to show that.

This morning, though, the week finally caught me. I was just too exhausted to do anything outside. It didn’t help that it was almost 90F today, and that being short on rest makes me queasy, which itself just piles on top of the queasiness I’m having when pouring food down the tube, which I think is a sign that the balloon has deflated, as it did last time. AND: we had our first heat index day.

This is the earliest date here at the ranch for a heat index day.

Now, though, it’s about an hour-ish until sundown, and it’s cooler (82F and with a light breeze as I type this) and I can hear some distant thunder – a forecast of rain that, as usual, passed us by. I feel much better after just doing some “real” work as needed, and resting inside. I’m thinking about popping out and putting the cuke seed and the zuke/squash seed in. That would be a couple fewer things that need to be done tomorrow.

Look to the skies

Space nuts, unite! The Perseid meteor shower will peak on August 12. Get out and do some sky watching. If it’s mosquito season, as it is here, and you have lots of standing water from constant rains, as we do here, put on something to repel them. I was out taking some pictures of Mars this evening, and they were horrific.

Speaking of Mars….

Taken with the Canon.

Taken with the Nikon. Mars is just below and left of center. Hit the image to see the fuller version. This was taken with an extended shutter time, because of course it’s dark as hell out here at the ranch, and I wanted to capture more as we have a rare clear evening here in the summer tonight. It’s gorgeous and rather humbling to gaze up at the night sky.

Back here on the mothership, though, we still have things to do, people and animals to take care of, and on and on. I spent several hours at the NOC today, redoing a server for someone who wants a testing server in addition to their production server, and crawling around, tracing lines. It’s time for our location audit, and at least one part is done: the physical locations of every piece of gear. Tracing power cables and ethernet cables, though, is tedious, dirty, sweaty work (because you’re on the heat side of the row, with all those servers blowing hot air on you) and takes more than one trip (unless it’s a completely epic trip where you get to ignore everything else in your life for eight hours).

I had stepped outside last night to look off to the east where a storm was passing, to see it was viable to set up a camera to try to capture some lightning. It was not, but I did find this fat bumpy guy hanging out on the porch.

He didn’t budge, even when Einstein was sniffing him.

And because I have 21 chicks hanging out in my garage, here’s a pic of a bunch of them piled up in the corner after I had changed out the pads in the brooder. You’ll notice there’s already poop on the new pads. Apparently they cannot go more than two seconds without pooping. But, they are all still alive, happily peeping away when they’re not sleeping.

After the NOC work, I popped by Tractor Supply to get some pine shavings for their bedding. They’ve had enough time to understand what their food is and where, so they should not be trying to eat giant volumes of the bedding.  At first, they didn’t want to walk on it.  But as I spread it out all around them and then into the corner they all ran to, they got themselves together and went back to their pooping, cheeping ways.

The Cornish X bird – the yellow ones – are growing much more quickly than the layers. You can tell already. They are going to be good eating when their brief, but happy, lives comes to an end.

Until next time, peeps: be well.

 

 

Police yourself

Or at least your email.

Company-wise, we have a policy of three year retention of mail; indefinite for certain special items. Personally, I try to keep things trimmed to the last year at most. I wish more people would set themselves some kind of purge schedule for mail. I’m trying to move someone with 140 gigs – that GIGS – of mail spread throughout their corporate mail. Do you really, really need a copy of  that mail you sent six years ago? Or some piece of mail you received four years ago that references something that no longer even exists?

Figure out some kind of policy for your mail and make it as common a chore as vacuuming your floors or changing your bedsheets. Your mailbox (and your mail administrator) will thank you.

Don’t count your eggs

Before they’ve been popped out by a hen.

No, that isn’t the way that saying goes.

Chick prep day whatever: today I braved Tractor Supply to lay in some stores for the chicks, due to arrive (probably) Tuesday. I’m sure the USPS will be much happier with a box of peeping chicks than packages of humming bees.

Anyhow, the local place was hopping today: I counted over a dozen other people there, including the stereotypical grizzled old cowboy, boots, hat, and a belt buckle that was rather impressive. He had a head full of white that nicely set off his deep tan – what could be seen of it, since he was also decked out in jeans and a long-sleeved shirt. People may wonder about working outdoors, in Florida, in summer, wearing long pants and long-sleeved shirts, but if you’re doing certain types of work (especially during mosquito season) it’s better to have more cover than less. He was not, alas, there to buy a new hay corral or have Big Jim (in my mind, there is always a “Big Jim” at a feed store or Tractor Supply) load up some heavy ass posts and giant rolls of cattle fencing because he was finally closing in that big piece of pasture, you know the one, on down past that new pond, right?

Nope.

Just a single item, maybe two, that I couldn’t even see from where I was in the line with my 50 pound bag of chick starter feed, some chick grit, and a new trough at the other register they finally opened to relieve Elaine (that was her name, actually), who originally had us about ten deep waiting to check out.

I also had to hit up Target today, looking for a couple of adapters. It wasn’t a horrible experience, completely, but that is one soulless, non-interactive place to be. I imagine it’s only a half step up from Wal-Mart, which I have not visited in well over 15 years at this point, thankfully. Not a single person talked to me – which is fine, I don’t exactly crave human contact – and as I went toward the checkout, the air smelled curdled somehow, as if someone had dropped a jug of milk that splattered everywhere but didn’t it get cleaned up all the way. Five days ago. Or it could have been the guy in line in front of me. Either way.

To top off my day, I had to go to Best Buy, which is now a riot of sound and gigantic active tv screens. They really, really, would like you to buy various appliances. At least the people are friendly enough, but the checkout takes forever because they want to see if you are in their system already. Whatever happened to the days of just buying the crap you need and getting out?

Also, I have to say that moving all the electronic detritus you’ve accumulated from one machine to another has to rank up there with the most tedious, annoying things you have to do. Even more annoying is when you realize you copied some of the outlook-related files, but not the actual PST file that you need to go on the new system. Argh.

Funny stuff from the folks who made the hanging waterers I bought (instead of making them myself because my time is money and I’ve got enough capital tied up in other things at this moment): they would like you to know they also sell nesting boxes – for the non-chicken initiated, these are where the chickens will lay their eggs, typically, although they will also lay them on the floor or, even more fun, under bushes/plants, where you won’t find them until much, much later, and one wrong move translates into a very big mistake involving the sulfuric aroma of rotten eggs. Anyhow, their illustrations just made me laugh, and perhaps you’ll get a chuckle, too.

It is true that chickens, once they start eating their own eggs, will often continue to do so unless they are physically prevented from doing it. There are solutions for that, but the best thing is to prevent them from doing it in the first place. Giving them good nesting boxes and collecting the eggs on a regular basis tends to do the trick. More importantly: no poop on the eggs! (In reality, with good nesting boxes of any sort, the eggs will generally be poop-free.)

Until next time peeps: be well.