The BOFHJournal at LJ

bofhcam @ 2009-12-16T16:45:00

2009-12-16T16:46:07Z

Happy Friday! Well, it is for me. I'm off out of here tonight. We're both heading to Manchester on the train. Here's hoping that the snow doesn't come down either tonight or Sunday evening. The train network here just can't cope with anything other than brilliant sunshine (not too hot though, it warps the tracks) and a wee bit of wind and rain. We're pretty much packed, Kris is making us an awesome picnic dinner to have on the Virgin Cross Country service and I've got Pride and Prejudice and Zombies to read.

Today's been pretty good for 'stuff'. I've had a quote from the roofing guy for the work I need him to do (and if I say yes before the VAT rate goes up I can save a bit of money, too), I've received another Christmas present delivery to sneak past Kris when I get home and it turns out that I won't be fitting a new RAID card on Monday but just a new RAID card battery. That should prove to be a little less worrisome.

I went for a run at lunchtime. Despite the chilly weather I still had to take my gloves off somewhere around the 4km mark to stop my hands from overheating. All in all a rather good run and perhaps just 30 seconds or so off my best time for 8km.

Speaking of time, I think I should end my working week here and head home so we can get the bus in time to get the train to get out of town. Hope the house hasn't sprung a leak by the time I get home.

Next week is, as I've mentioned before, going to be hectic and more than a little fun-packed.

bofhcam @ 2009-12-15T17:15:00

2009-12-15T17:19:33Z

In a fit of rebellion I'm not going to go to the boat house this evening either. Don't all gasp at once. I've just got too much to do in terms of wrapping presents and getting ready for tomorrow evening.

A few bits of literal housekeeping next. First off we had Tim the builder come over this morning to look at the damp issues in the house. He had some useful suggestions regarding the vent we have in the rear wall ("block it up") and the bits of wet/mold we're getting in the window reveals. We also went outside to look at the crack in the rear wall and have arranged for a quote for fixing that with some repointing and having a half-brick or two replaced. He the drilled some holes to check on whether damp was coming in to one bit of plasterwork via the outside and determined that no, it wasn't. So that's OK. A fairly major bit of work on my neighbour's concrete 'patio' is going to be required to stop it being above the damp course on the rear of my property where it apparently seems to have been for the last decade or so. Basically he's going to chop away the concrete to a width of a spade or so, fill it with gravel and put a new edging on it. This should allow water to go into the ground rather than soaking into the brickwork. Some work on the downpipe should also be done too and it's all going to be dealt with in the new year. Seems the list of issues with this house just keeps on building (no pun intended). I really don't think the people who added the extension (which became my house) on to the original house really knew what they were doing. It won't cost too much and should deal with another good few damp issues we've been noticing. During the day I also called the roofing guy who's promised the photos of the guttering and a quote tomorrow and the bathroom fitter's called to say he'll call again on Friday to arrange a visit on Monday to see what he can do about the bathroom sink tap and the shuddering pipework. Did I mention that when the toilet cistern finishes filling the closing of the valve makes the pipes rattle? Well, there's that too.

Work today has been following up with Sun with regard to the calls I have open and discovering that I'm going to have to be in work for 07:00 on Monday to do a RAID card swap out. Really not the best way to start the week, especially after having been traveling until late the night before. If Kris needs me to I should be able to then go back home to be around for the bathroom guy to talk to me rather than dumping it on her. Still, all things considered it's going to be an awesome week bookended with Christmas and other big things. Speaking of which I had a call about something I was after which is now in the shop. I should probably collect that before next Tuesday at the latest.

It's now gone 17:00 so I guess I should head home and get things started on the organisational front for tomorrow. Kris and I are off to see my parents in Manchester for four days (and a very late Wednesday night) so there'll be no entries after tomorrow's until Monday.

bofhcam @ 2009-12-14T16:30:00

2009-12-14T16:30:52Z

It was another one of those good weekend things again. Tesco shopping on the Friday while it's still pretty quiet, Saturday morning rowing with people who actually wanted to be there (even if the actual outing wasn't amazing), the afternoon spent shopping and reading while Kris was at the cinema. To be honest the whole day felt a bit Sunday-like. That's OK of course, especially when Sunday is a whole other day still to come. On the whole I'd say it was a pretty lovely day.

Among the things that happened on Sunday there was a realisation that water is leaking from around the place where the mixer tap on the bathroom sink comes out of the sink itself onto the floor beneath the cabinet the sink is on/in, that the house really has to be kept warm otherwise the cold does a real number with condensation at the top of the walls and around the window reveals and that Cat and Julian's new rented accommodation is really quite nice. As I wasn't rowing in the morning Kris and I took the opportunity to enjoy a nice morning to ourselves before heading over to the housewarming to spend some time socialising and generally getting to see people for perhaps the last time before Christmas. The weather was pretty cold and wet on the way there and colder but dryer on the way home. We fought against this by leaving the heating on, spending time reading and doing computery things and then cooking an extremely tasty but problematic (more in a second on that) roast lamb dinner with roast potatoes and sprouts.

Unfortunately it looks like the food was a little too rich/the potatoes or something a little too soaked in fat because we felt pretty leaden in mind and body when we got up this morning. I got myself to the server room in town where I met with an MGE engineer and someone from our UPS maintenance contractors who informed me that what I'd been told at the IT exhibition was perhaps correct and that we would need an MGE IT engineer to come out and check all internal firmwares (non-user accessible too) were in sync/complimentary so as to perhaps avoid and future signaling issues to client software. Then he replaced all the capacitors.

Back at the office I've been trying to juggle three different calls open with Sun at the moment for about five different x4X40 servers which are having a variety of RAID and ILOM/IPMI issues. It seems that if you leave the SP up for too long without a reset things get a little odd. I had to cold reset one chassis to get the SP reporting stuff via ipmitool and even the web GUI. It didn't help that when shutting down the OS the box hung and then had a soft lockup loop on unloading the IPMI drivers.

I think I'm going to go home shortly, see how the first of Kris' three Skype interviews today went, wash up and then head out to the boathouse with a heavy cycle ("step") to do my next 2K erg test. I just hope I don't twinge my back again (and that I get a good time).

bofhcam @ 2009-12-11T16:15:00

2009-12-11T16:15:19Z

So last night was awesome. We had nine people in the house including Kris and I. The cookie selection was amazing (all Kris' own work) there was plenty of mulled wine and mulled apple juice which I'd never had before but certainly will again, mince pies, cheese and oat cakes and brandy butter stuff. We also managed to get through "How the Grinch Stole Christmas!" (1966) "A Charlie Brown Christmas" (1965) and "A Christmas Story" (1983) to the reasonable enjoyment of pretty much everyone. The last one is apparently something of a US (or at least Kris' family) favourite. I saw it as perhaps something Zach Braff used to watch a lot before he started doing Scrubs.

Obviously there was a lot of condensation in the house this morning and the window frames in a few places were cold and damp. I blame the temperature really dropping last night (foggy all of today) and the amount of people we had breathing in the house. Not that you can stop people doing that and it was lovely to have everyone there.

Work today has been kind of slow. Not much is happening as we get closer to Christmas except some maintenance work on bits of hardware which're going wrong and a few software updates and the like. There's still some UPS maintenance to be done (Monday morning I'll be in town for 09:00 to make sure nothing goes wrong (again) and to grill an MGE engineer on just what the deal is with firmware and stuff) and some scripts to write, but isn't that always the way?

At lunch time I headed into town to buy a special thing or two (which either took a lot longer than it should, or much less time than it should, I'm not sure which) and then came back to bury myself in work for a while. I'll be off shortly to do the first round of Christmas Tesco shopping with Kris and then it's the weekend with rowing (no race as we didn't get our entry in in time) and other fun things.

bofhcam @ 2009-12-09T17:05:00

2009-12-09T17:05:35Z

I'm stuck here waiting for the UPS engineer to finish filling the APC chassis with two tons of lead acid batteries at the moment. I hope he finishes pretty close to 17:00 as I'm heading into town for a spot of very thoughtful shopping. After that I intend to go home, do some washing up and relax for the rest of the evening. If Kris was going running then perhaps some erging would be on the cards but right now I'd rather just make sure I don't do something silly to my lower back before the training session and Head race on Saturday.

Speaking of which, I subbed in for someone last night in a Vet IV+. It's silly but the more experienced I get at rowing the more nervous I get about getting into a boat with people who are far far better than I. Last night for example I was not only the shortest by at least an inch and a half but there was an ex-international, ex-Cambridge Blue guy, a guy who has been rowing in national lightweight crews on and off for at least a decade and someone who's been rowing for at least ten to fifteen years... and me. I can't remember concentrating so hard on something physical since I did my first lead ascent of an outside pitch. Suffice it to say the fact that it was pretty much pitch dark didn't help (although maybe it did, I'm not sure now I think about it), but the water was millpond flat, everyone else in the boat knew how to keep it steady and aside from a few meta/proto twinges to my lower back I think I got through the outing without embarrassing myself, even if the cox kept reminding me to square earlier and get a bit more cover.

Some of yesterday, especially once I got home, was spent firefighting an issue which raised its head during the morning. I think a satisfactory solution has been found but for a little while things were touch and go. I was also hoping to fix another issue but when I connected from home to check it appeared that someone else had already done the work. I just hope that what was done was a fix for the problem I was seeing.

Anyway, since I finished that sentence the UPS engineer has finished his work and left the premises so I can do so too!

bofhcam @ 2009-12-03T16:55:00

2009-12-03T16:57:42Z

I started off the day feeling really very tired. Didn't go to bed particularly late but neither of us seemed to sleep terribly deeply. With Kris' help I dragged myself out of bed and we both headed into town. She to do some dissertation work with a change of scene and me to do a server reinstall. My work went pretty flawlessly so I popped into a few shops to make some Christmas purchases before heading to work in the cold, windy weather. I also did a bit of window shopping which I should probably drag Kris along to help me with on account of it being Quite Important she's happy with what I'm interested in.

I've been for an 8km run in penance for yesterday's pigging out at the IT Exhibition (damn that over-supplied finger food) and not going to the boat house. It was cold, wet and windy... but oddly satisfying. I'll make sure I go down there this evening to sign up for the outings this weekend. I just hope my back doesn't twinge again while I'm in a boat. Speaking of which, the race I wasn't asked to be in a crew for this Saturday at Wallingford got cancelled yesterday. They're scheduling it for January. Hopefully I'll get in some boat or other then.

Still nothing from either of the builders. Also since we've had the heating on longer and lower the condensation seems to have abated a little, which is satisfying. I just hope a cold snap doesn't bring it all back again. Or a huge amount of rain makes the walls get all damp again. Darn it, I want a new house!

bofhcam @ 2009-12-02T16:35:00

2009-12-02T16:37:07Z

No training for me today. I didn't even go for a run at lunch time (although I should have) on account of going into town to check out the IT Exhibition being hosted by our Institution. It was dull and I wish I'd gone running instead, even if it was pretty cold and damp.

Speaking of cold and damp I called the roofer who came over on Monday and the builder who did the lintel installation (must get those pictures up on the gallery soon!) about various bits of work the house really should have done (before Christmas if possible). The cracks in the house are hopefully only getting damp from above rather than from cracked damp coursing below. Having a roofer come out and look at the first possible cause and getting it fixed would be helpful first step. He's said he'll quote for putting in some silicone sealant and some Thompsons Water Seal, so that might fix it. The builder who's coming out to deal with another damp spot around one of the windows he resealed after plastering around it might also venture an opinion when he comes over at some point soon. It's very much better to deal with these things sooner rather than later so that the ball goes into someone else's court and the worry level can be reduced. At least a little.

I've had to scale back a few thoughts and stuff I'd let grow a little bit out of control in the last week or so. It's not a step back in any way, more a return to the balance point I had mistakenly assumed had been tipped past. Very much a situation resulting from my own assumptions and now set to rights. So that's good. I should remember that one very important decision isn't affected by anything else though. And despite thoughts to the contrary this morning, should still happen fairly soon.

Cryptic enough? Probably not.

I finally managed to do something I've been meaning to for years this afternoon and that was subscribe to Wil Wheaton's blog. I don't know why but for some embarrassing reason I feel a kind of kinship with him. We're of a similar age and seem to share a huge amount of similar humours, thoughts and outlooks on life. Of course he's massively more witty, erudite, well-written and of course famous than I am and will never ever know who I am, but I'd like to think that if we met we'd get on well.

Other than that I guess I'm done for the day here. A few emails exchanged with clueless people about the UPS, some kickstart configurations tidied up for tomorrow morning when I start in the centre of town rather than here in the office and a USB stick safely packed in my pannier. I think I'll head off into town shortly, enter a prize draw I have no hope of winning, grab some free snacks and pretend I know what I'm talking about when I discuss SANs with someone from Sun.

bofhcam @ 2009-12-01T17:10:00

2009-12-01T17:10:17Z

Huh. December. Only 30 days to the end of the year. There's an awful lot that's going to happen between now and 2010. An awful lot. Seriously.

Today was a good start to that. After last night's great ergo session which went to pot in the last 30 seconds when I twinged my back something fierce as I was winding up to come in right on the average wattage I was supposed to it was lovely to wake up and find that the windows weren't terribly condensationed given it got below freezing last night and that Kris was there to remind me of some of the finer aspects of life, including bluberry loaf in my lunch.

At work barely an hour Kris rang from town to tell me that Borders were selling everything at 20% off so I dashed into town to spend about an hour pondering what extra Christmas presents to get her. I'm pretty sure I got the best choices from what I was hoping to get.

Back at work there was just time to do some documentation catchup and email one of our engineers about the UPSes and the parallel call I've got in with APC/MGE/Schnieder Electric before it was time for a burrito. With that in hand I was able to start thinking about lengthy emails I needed to write, read and ponder some more about Remus and close down some web sites I'd been using on and off for the past five or more years. No need for them now; they were just becoming a distraction. I have dinner with Kate last night as a lovely Turkish restaurant to thank for that.

Happily my back hasn't been a problem since I got up this morning but I'm still going to avoid the boat house and a gym session this evening to give it a proper rest. Kris wants to put up the Christmas tree anyway and I need to finish doing some painting in the bathroom so it should be a full evening by any measure.

In other news, the thing I sent back a week or so ago appears to have finally arrived but a replacement in the size I want isn't available. Luckily the people I bought it from are going to be very helpful about things, which is nice. All I need now is for the tax thing to come through and Christmas might be a perfect time to get an extra thing or two to make Kris happy.

Speaking of which, I should get this Amazon thing home along with myself so she can hide it and we can eat advent calendar truffles.

bofhcam @ 2009-11-27T16:30:00

2009-11-27T16:30:19Z

Having just met Kris after work to head to Tesco to collect such things as a large turkey and an imperial buttload of cranberry sauce for Saturday I nearly catapulted myself over my recently-replaced handlebars in my excitement at a possible turn of events which may or may not take place in the next few months. That's about all I can say for now as there's not actually anything more I can say. I guess it comes down to hope, happiness and support. Cryptic enough? Probably not. Oh well.

No-one tirned up for last night's Thursday as most people are hopefully coming to tomorrow's Thanksgiving thingy. Illness and last might decisions notwithstanding we should have about ten people sitting down to eat in total. Kris and I will be sprucing the house up this evening (and probably tomorrow morning in an attempt to make it look vaguely presentable. Given I'm not rowing tomrrow on account of the river being closed we should be able to sleep in slightly (this means Kris will still get up at 05:00 but might come back to bed around about 07:30) before manning the pumps.

Today has been mainly about battling to get hold of someone at APC/MGE/Schneider Electric who can help me with the Network Management Card Transverse and Network Shutdown Module issues I've mentioned a few times before. It turns out the reason my call wasn't returned the same day or the next was that it wasn't actually passed to an engineer. Which is a bit poor if I say so myself. I was promised a call back before 16:30 today (looks pointedly at watch) so I guess this means a Monday call instead.

Something I sent back in the post a few days ago still doesn't seem to have arrived with the people I bought it from. I find this bothersome. Hopefully it will arrive with them over the weekend or next week and they'll be able to send me the right thing instead. Otherwise I think that's it for this week. Have a good weekend and we'll be back on Monday.

bofhcam @ 2009-11-24T17:00:00

2009-11-24T17:00:05Z

A frustrating day today. I've been unable to find anything which can do what I want when it comes to UPS and power monitoring. Despite a day of searching (including for an email address for Eaton in the UK) I'm coming up short. Annoying doesn't quite cover it. Surely we can't be the only people with a server room/data centre who have something approaching this problem...

Last night's ergo session was interesting. While I was obviously behind some of the real powerhouses in the men's squad it was nice to see that I was ahead of some of my younger (but similarly skilled contemporaries). I'll admit that these last few weeks I haven't been training quite as much as them (especially when it comes to weights and erg sessions) but the injuries I've had certainly needed some time away from that kind of exercise. Hopefully I'll have a chance between now and 14 December to pick up my game a little as that's when we do our next round of tests. Weights tonight though, then something scrummy to eat courtesy of the lovely (and currently contemplating her future) Kris.

Oh, and the team leader of the web team has just come through and asked for a major architectural change to the Xen setup I created for him and his team about two years ago. I hope I can remember what the hell I need to do to make the changes he wants!

bofhcam @ 2009-11-23T17:20:00

2009-11-23T17:20:46Z

I should have gone home already. I'm supposed to be going to the boat house this evening to do an AT erg session but I don't know if I'll get out of here in time. I think I will. Anyway, the thing that's been keeping me here has been research into replacement power monitoring solutions to bypass the network card in the MGE UPS on account of it being crap. More on that tomorrow though, I guess.

I was racing on Saturday morning. Even with a bad back I was looking forward to it. Long story short we did really well and perhaps would have won our event if we hadn't been placed badly in the lineup and ended up having to a) pass slower crews and, b) make an abortive detour around some novices and crashed into them. Still, no harm done other than the fact that I don't seem to have been selected for the next race on 6 December and someone I've never heard of has what might have been my seat. Oh well, I guess it means I get a lie-in that morning instead. Such is life.

Kris and I did all the cleaning and a Tesco trip (in the other order) on Friday evening so there wasn't anything to do (other than the painting, which we didn't do) house-wise over the weekend, which was awesome. With the weather being poo we didn't go out much except to wander around town a bit and go to Borders and Shaun's birthday drinks on Saturday evening. With the rain seeming to have stopped on Sunday morning I took the opportunity to go for a long run and was punished with some torrential rain and a real need for the loo on the way back. I retaliated by staying indoors for the rest of the day while Kris napped her headache away.

My sleep's still a little interrupted around 03:00 most nights at the moment. Still not entirely sure why but Kris and I have some possibly remedies in the works. I've completely failed to update my Amazon wishlist or email someone about meeting up with them for a drink this week so maybe I'll do that tonight or tomorrow morning. Other than that... Home time I think.

bofhcam @ 2009-11-18T16:25:00

2009-11-18T16:25:06Z

I'm out of here thirty minutes early today on account of getting in before 08:00 this morning to restart a service. This is actually very helpful today as it means I can get a lift to the DIY store to finally return the bits of stuff I need to, and get some heavy tins of paint at the same time.

I forgot to mention that I went to see 2012 on Monday evening. As forgettable as it was overlong it was still moderately enjoyable and worth the cycle in the wind. More enjoyable was the fact that Kris made it home at a reasonable hour of the evening yesterday after some snap decision making with regard to coming home and then some olympic running skills to catch a connection or two. Much better to have her home than to have to talk on the phone about the day.

Today though has been pretty much about checking that all our Sun servers are on the maintenance contract we have and helping web developers publish their applications to the three or four different places they need to be put before they're happy.

Other than that I went for another run today at a fair old speed and worked up some good sweat. This is helpful in making sure I don't let the boat down on Saturday when we race. Of course I'm still not 100% sure my back's going to last the distance, but them's the breaks (not literally though, I hope!).

Tonight will involve sausages. And also sprouts. But mostly sausages.

bofhcam @ 2009-11-13T16:40:00

2009-11-13T16:40:06Z

End of another week. I've yet to complete painting the bathroom but there's a chance I may be able to do something about that this weekend if Kris and I don't end up going to London tomorrow for someone's birthday. Something I forgot to mention yesterday is that I went for a fast 20 minute run yesterday and nothing fell off me. This is a good thing and makes me much more confident that this weekend's rowing isn't going to lead to me suffering any more harm than usual when it comes to 2 hours of rowing in the cold and wet. So that's good.

I managed to get rid of another two decommissioned servers today. I had been hoping to combine that with a trip to Homebase to return some laminate flooring and such but it doesn't seem to have turned out that way, which is a shame. Perhaps next week.

There was something I was meaning to write about just a few minutes ago but it seems to have completely slipped my mind. While I'm letting it bubble back to the surface I'll tell you that this weekend consists of rowing, a possible trip to London for someone's birthday meal combined with some possible shopping before heading home again for another birthday meal in the evening. The first meal obviously requires me to get out of rowing as quickly as possible and jump on a train with Kris. If we don't do that we might be able to do the weekend Tesco run and/or go to Homebase for some paint for the bathroom. It's all up in the air at the moment. We're also definitely going to London on the Sunday for some early Christmas looking/shopping and to see Melanie Gardot at the Southbank Centre (for free on account of the last thing we saw there having a terrible support 'act' which enough people complained about that we all got the chance for free tickets to the next thing we wanted to see there). That trip will eat up all of Sunday after rowing so there's nothing to do there but lie back, relax and accept that nothing else will be going on.

It turns out one of my exes is contemplating moving back to Cambridge after she left for the bright lights, better job prospects and other attractions of London a few years back. Given the move would almost certainly require a new job (commuting just isn't 100% feasible I don't think) I have to wonder what's sparked the thought process. The social dynamic here would also undergo a change (as it would whenever anyone (re)enters the group). I guess it won't really affect me in person as the chances are I'll be leaving here before she arrives.

Kris sent me the remainder of the things she needs printed out for her Edinburgh job thingy on Monday and Tuesday next week. I've done so and am finding that I'm in a state of distraction/disconnection regarding the whole thing. I think it's a combination of knowing the outcome either way will be huge and yet at the same time completely out of my control which leaves me seemingly unconsiously seeking the refuge of ignoring it except in that I'm giving Kris as much love and support as I can and hoping very very much that the people she'll be seeing realise just how fabulous she is for the role they have available. You'll know more about how it goes when I do.

I think that's it for me today. I don't quite know what's happening this evening. We're either going to Tesco, or we're not. If not then I'm hopeful that the evening will be just as fun as I've been thinking about all day. The rain will, I'm sure, keep coming down and tomorrow's (and Sunday's) rowing will be close to miserable. Still, there's plenty of Kris to warm and keep warm before then.

I don't seem to have recalled what it was I was going to tell you. I remember the 'shape' of it in my mind, but just can't seem to get a proper grasp of the meat of it, as it were. I don't think it matters, to be honest. Have a good weekend. If it comes to me I'll make a note and tell you on Monday.

bofhcam @ 2009-11-12T16:55:00

2009-11-12T16:55:46Z

I was in early this morning to do some patching. Not as early as is usually the case (07:00) but pretty early nevertheless. It was all going pretty swimmingly until I discovered that the DB I needed to shut down on account of there being active processes/connections. I ended up having to wait about half an hour before someone who was authorised to do nasty things to the DB came into work before I could run some other stop scripts and get the beast of a machine patched. The rest of everything went pretty smoothly after that. I've now only got thirteen machines which're unpatched (still on RHEL5.3 rather than 5.4 + whatever's come out since then), which isn't too bad really.

Kris continues to work so very hard it's embarrassing just how much harder working than me she is. Anyone she applies to work for would be lucky to have someone as devoted as she is to being good at what she does. I just hope it all comes together/comes out for her at the beginning of next week. Of course no matter where she ends up I'll be looking for a job close by and eventually joining her once I've done the 1001 things necessary to allow me to rent my home out (to hopefully some good friends who'll treat it as I would). The whole process occasionally fills me with fear, based on the amount of change (for which I'm universally known as averse to) which is coming down the pipe for us both but which sometimes transmutes into excitement about the new possibilities which'll be coming my/our way. I just wish there was a method through which I can lock it into the latter rather than randomly flickering into the former.

Standard Thursday evening gathering at my place tonight. I should probably head off soon and make sure the house is presentable. You never know what'll happen if you leave a Kris at unattended at home for the day.

bofhcam @ 2009-11-09T16:55:00

2009-11-09T16:55:22Z

Well, I have a bathroom, and it's finished too. Well, other than me needing to paint a few coats of white and them some moisture-resistant stuff in a colour we want. It looks pretty brilliant too. I think we need another cabinet to replace the one we took down and a new shower curtain but otherwise thus far there have been no leaks and nothing's fallen off or broken. The new height of the floor in there is noticably higher than the landing carpet so we're going to have to get into the habit of not stubbing/scuffing toes on the threshold but otherwise it's smashing. Much much nicer than it was before and much lighter too. The radiator/towel rail is huge which is what happens when you get a free upgrade. I was right about not noticing the little dings and things it has, so that's good too.

Kris and I had a mixed but ultimately enjoyable weekend. For my part I rowed both mornings although I was freezing one day and under dressed and perfectly warm and over dressed the next. I also rowed both sides, which enhances my chances of getting into a boat as I'm becoming truly used to both sides. Saturday we went to Tesco, Sunday... we failed to do much of anything outside the house after our respective morning exercise. I think this was a good thing even if it didn't get paint bought.

Whilest watching an episode of House I managed to thoroughly confuse and upset Kris with a chain of 'logic' that not even I can explain in retrospect. Happily she was more sensible than I was and after my repeated failures to explain myself to either of our satisfaction promptly forgave me and we got on with the rest of the evening in a much better mood. I really have to work on clarifying my thoughts before speaking them out loud. As my mother once (paraphrasedly) told me "you can only upset your partner with the things you say, not the things you think". I will try harder to take a rule from the DIY school of thought and think twice and speak once. Maybe that way I'll be less confusing to be around.

There's rowing training tonight at the boat house (as usual). Hopefully I'll get back the rowing top (in club colours) someone accidently picked up on Saturday morning from the changing room. The training is four four minute pieces at a very hard rate. I think it's going to be a rather tiring experience.

This should counterbalance the relaxing and smoothly running day I've had here at work patching six more machines up to RHEL5.4 and the nice 6km run I had at lunch in the bright winter sun.

bofhcam @ 2009-11-05T16:35:00

2009-11-05T16:35:06Z

After the bathroom fitters kindly chose to stay late the night before last to make sure we had a working toilet I returned last night to find that after having fitted the sink the toilet was now rather too close to it. So close in fact that it was very easy to bang my right tricep on the edge of the sink as it hung over the vanity unit it perches on. Thinking I could get used to it (and imagining that I wouldn't need to deal with it for any more than a year if Kris and I end up somewhere else) I let them leave for the day. By the time Kris asked me to meet her in town before her running club and my erg session at the boat house I was becoming more and more sure I wanted/needed it moved. Obviously Kris was superb at helping me come to a decision and then making sure I had the stones to go through the phone calls with the lead fitter and then the person who'd sold us the bathroom from the store. After a fairly large amount of ego massage of the fitter and some roundabout comments to the store assistant it was actually the fitter and his sub-contracted plumber who came up with an idea which Kris watched put into action this morning while I was at work.

I had to be up and in town before 07:00 this morning to start the last bit of major work on our HR system DB servers. While I was patching, rebooting, doing RDAC upgrades and fibre plugging my team leader was here at work doing the same thing to another one. Meanwhile, by lunch Kris called to report that the toilet had been moved the significant 3-4cm necessary to centre it a bit more between sink and bath. I trust Kris, she tells me it's much better; I can't wait to see it. Hopefully a lot more of the tiling and other finishing bits and bobs will have been done by the time I make it home this evening. We are still short one 'reducer' (something to deal with the height difference between the bathroom and landing floors. Kris and I should be going to the store this evening to see if they have any in stock before heading down to the boat house to meet what's turned out to be a rather large amount of our friends to watch the fireworks and generally socialise outside of my house for a Thursday evening. I have no idea how crowded or otherwise it's going to be but everything this year is new again for me as I experience it for the first time with Kris. I know she's not terrible enamoured of fireworks and we're going to be very hungry by the time we leave for home but I think it should be a fun evening and certainly drier and less mud-spattered than if we were on the common with the commoners.

For now, I'm going to finish doing what I'm doing and get out of her just a few minutes earlier than I might have otherwise so I can see Kris, maybe catch the fitter and offer thanks again for what is probably an installation-saving solution to the toilet problem (even if he and the plumber caused it in the first place by not thinking about measurements before they put the toilet back exactly where the old one was).

Oh, I didn't mention that Kris rocks. And I love her.

bofhcam @ 2009-11-03T16:50:00

2009-11-03T16:50:04Z

So last night I did my AT erg. I'll admit, I didn't quite keep to the 80% power rating I should have, but I still maintain that having had two weeks off I'm still not back to my best. At least I stayed for a bit afterwards and got some good tips from one of the coaches.

The bathroom company have yanked me around a bit more. They didn't have the radiator I'd ordered so they have supplied me with the next size up of the same model that they did have in stock. Only it has a few small marks/dings. I don't think I care at this point. The actual contractors doing the work appear (to Kris) to be doing a good job. It's a shame that a whole chunk of necessary bits wasn't on the original quote and required further payment yesterday. Today more payment has been necessary to pay for the valves which weren't included with the radiator either. Luckily the contractors saved the day again by going to a much cheaper plumbers' supply store to get them.

Work today has consisted of running Nessus scans over all of our Solaris, linux and Windows servers and getting the resulting reports into a more readable format with some Perl parsing of the .nessus files. I fully intend to go home shortly and see how things are going before heading out to the boat house for some weights work.

I guess that's it. More thanks to Kris for her continued wonderful and vital efforts in coordinating the overhaul of the bathroom. She's lovely. And she cooks pretty brilliantly too.

bofhcam @ 2009-10-28T17:10:00

2009-10-28T17:10:06Z

It turns out that the person next door is selling his house. This is interesting as I get to see what he's asking for it. It turns out it's only just a little over 16K more than I paid for my house in 2004. This isn't brilliant if I want to end up selling my house in the next year or so. On top of that I've just rediscovered that the person who owned my house before me paid almost half what he sold it to me for. That hurts. Still, I've lived a lot of life in the place since I bought it. When I move I still don't know if I'll sell or rent. I guess it depends what happens next year with regard to where Kris ends up and what job I'm able to get. I just hope if I rent I'm able to at least match the mortgage payments, especially if interest rates go through the roof as they're potentially going to.

That thought about my mind's wandered to the fact that Kris is likely going to be called for a job or post-doc interview in the US in the very near future (possibly even before Christmas). Obviously this means she won't be coming back, probably for a long time as she'll either get the job there or not be allowed back unless she gets offered a job (interview) here in the UK. If she goes back to the US for an interview and then has an interview here I'm not sure what'll happen. Maybe evidence of an official job interview (with attendant potential of a work permit) would mean the UK Border Agency would let her back in. I assume so. It certainly doesn't need thinking about just yet though anyway. Suffice it to say it'd be nice if she got an offer from Edinburgh (where she's applied) and then they offer her the post.

Although, given how much I love her I guess it doesn't really matter where she gets a job so long as I can get a decent job there too. We'll always look for a job for her in the UK but there's no reason why I can't try living in the US for a while if I can cover everything financially.

Anyway, yes, that's what's inside my head at the moment. I should go home after a fairly quiet day here and get ready for more exercise at the boat house. Last night's was a good reintroduction, but my quads ache a bit now so tonight is going to be interesting to say the least. The meal Kris made last night was awesome. I should mention that. A duck cooked to perfection is getting to be one of her signature dishes now. I'm so proud and impressed.

bofhcam @ 2009-10-16T16:40:00

2009-10-16T15:40:17Z

Supposedly the firmware patch I was applying to the RAID card this morning was going to be an easy reboot and action. Only it seems that there was more going on that previously thought. First of all the machine wouldn't power down after OS shutdown. Some kind of ACPI snafu. This should have clued me into the fact that something wasn't going well. When the BIOS started up it was sluggish and the SP claimed not to have an IP and the RAID card started screaming about something or other. I yanked the power and let the SP boot again. It seemed perfectly happy so I booted from the DOS boot USB stick and with the piercing keening of the RAID card saw that there was apparently a foreign configuration and a degraded array. I patched the firmware rebooted and went into the RAID card's BIOS setup. After accepting the 'foreign configuration' I set the array rebuilding, hoping to hell that the data was still being preserved rather than ending up with a perfectly clean RAID5. Only five minutes past when the machine should have been back up I booted the OS again and found that all was well. A minor issue with the application stop script, a random array rebuild and no SP/BIOS update in the time available. Still, not too bad for a Friday morning.

Since then I've been closing tickets, doing makework and generally making sure that I can leave my desk for the next week without anything going boom too loudly. This time tomorrow I'll be somewhere over the Atlantic, I hope.

So, other than that here's hoping I'm back, with Kris a week on Sunday morning to be back home again together some time before the end of the day. I'm not taking a camera on account of wanting to have my hands free and to keep the baggage as light as possible. If you're lucky I'll put up some of Kris' shots if any get taken at all. I can't wait to see her again. See you around.

bofhcam @ 2009-10-14T16:30:00

2009-10-14T15:37:13Z

Not having gone to do rowing training for two nights in a row I feel both a double dose of guilt and a mixture of antsy and lazy about whether I'll go tonight. In my vague defence I did manage to do a fair amount of painting (by which I mean touching up necessary repairs rather than a whole wall or something) instead before relaxing for the evening. I also made myself a decent(ish) meal in the hope of knocking some tummy troubles on the head too before I go away. I mean, airline food isn't going to help, is it?

I still need to clean and tidy the house before the end of Friday evening so that Kris comes back to a nice clean house. Therefore perhaps I should spend this evening doing that (considering tomorrow is Thursday and there's no training on a Friday). Maybe two weeks off rowing would be a good idea for me...

You know what? I think I will go with the housework this evening. I just can't conjour up enough enthusiasm to sit on an erg for what's likely to be at least 55 minutes this week. So, I'll go home in about half an hour and blitz the house for a few hours (bathroom, bedrooms, landing, stairs, lounge, kitchen) and then settle back and watch the last few episodes of Defying Gravity to get me up to date (although apparently there's only two more filmed and in the can). Theoretically it'll probably be the last time this bathroom will be cleaned, too. The next time it'll be one that's all shiny and new... maybe.

I'm not operating on all cylinders today across the board. Mentally, emotionally or professionally. I'm not down per se. More just... can't be arsed with anything. Such is life. I even slept a little better last night too.

bofhcam @ 2009-10-13T17:00:00

2009-10-13T16:00:36Z

As of now(ish) it's four days until I get to see Kris again. I'm really starting to miss her now. Especially with everything that's going on in our lives. Still, I just have to get through this week, heal my heels and work out why I'm not sleeping very well at all any my stomach is upset and we'll be home free. For a week anyway. I'm resolved that that week will be as fun and relaxed - as positively care free - as possible.

Speaking of care free, today has been like that. Aside from spending the entire day with my shoes and socks off to try and allow my heels to breathe, as it were, I haven't done much. Updated a few servers so they're checking the right log files as one of the DBAs moves databases around... In fact I just took a break in writing this to dash off a quick email about switching from direct Oracle connect strings to using an OCM to make things a little more transparent in the future. Or at least mean I only have to restart applications rather than frob configuration files.

I didn't go to the boat house last night. I don't feel terribly guilty about it but I do think I'll go this evening for the weights session. Hopefully I'll be able to find someone to mix in with as I don't actually know what the new exercises are. Anyway, having probably caused enough damage for the day, I'm off.

bofhcam @ 2009-10-12T17:00:00

2009-10-12T16:01:34Z

Packed weekendedness again. Saturday morning was rowing, of course. That went pretty well as far as I can recall. I was in a 4+ with one each of novice, experienced and French. This lead to some interesting rowing but some damned useful technique practice. The second session was useful for getting even more technique (leaning into the rigger). I left tired but feeling like I'd learned something. I went to Tesco after that, then had a bit of lunch. I can't honestly say what I did with the rest of the day. I know Kris and I had a nice impromptu chat on Skype. I'd like to say I did something, but for the life of me I can't remember what it was. I know that I did some painting on the Friday night, but that's about it. Something of note on Saturday evening was the fact that while I was making myself a rather nice omelette a mouse ran first across the kitchen and under some fitted cupboards and then past my shoe and into the corner by the table. I tried to finish my cooking before following it (rather than waste the eggs, ham and cheese) but it turned into rather overdone scrambled egg what with one thing and another. I was unable to find any sign of the mouse so I blocked up anything which I thought might have been its way in (I thought I'd heard something the night before) and searched the house from top to bottom. Nothing. I went to bed with all the doors closed.

Sunday morning was more rowing. The current crew lists have come out. I'm not too disappointed with the people I've been placed with. I'm not in the crews I would have liked to have been but then the person who might have had some sway over who was going in what boat for the last few weekends just doesn't seem to like me all that much. I find myself caring less and less as time goes by as I realise that it may not make any difference whatsoever in a few months. Anyway, we rowed again, I got to work on my technique, even if it meant unbalancing the boat given the fact the three other people in the boat weren't doing the same. Although we didn't have a second session like the day before while I was waiting for Kate to arrive the head coach pointed out some of the flaws in my stroke. I'm not entirely sure I can force my body into quite the posture he reckons it should be in (it's not a case of becoming more flexible, I just don't think my joints do that) but I've certainly learned some changes I can implement. Kate arrived on the dot of 11:00 and we headed out for her very first 10K run.

Now, it'd been raining when I'd left the house and I'd stupidly assumed that by the time we got back to the boat house it would be locked up. As such I hadn't brought any change of clothes or anything I would need to leave behind. This meant that I'd decided to row without socks to keep them dry for my run. As a result my feet got numb and it wasn't until too late I noticed that the poor shoes for my seat had rubbed the achillies heels raw on both of them. While they were fine once I'd strapped them up for the 10K (absolutely perfect in fact) this isn't good news for the amount of walking I'm going to be doing next week with Kris. I only hope they heal a bit before then. The run was pretty cool. Kate kept her pace well and we ended up back at the boat house in a time of about 49:30 or so. Not bad for her first ever run at that distance. I hope she does even better when she does the race next weekend.

Kate and I had lunch in the pub close to the boat house and then went our separate ways. I went home, had a nice long hot shower and then cycled out to Homebase to buy two mouse traps. Rather than go home again afterwards though I went into town and found myself a good book to read in Borders with a drink and something sweet to eat. About three hours later I meandered home and, after having smeared the right place with chocolate spread, set each of the traps in places I thought might be major mouse thoroughfares. By 21:00 I was feeling listless and bored, so I went to bed.

Probably because I went to bed early I woke early this morning feeling not entirely rested. Exercised and up I found that neither of the traps had been sprung. I'll leave them another day before I move them around the house to other locations. I headed to work and around midmorning the Sun engineer arrived with the selection of spare parts to fix that server which wasn't seeing a PSU. To cut a long story short, it was the internal power cable that was at fault. Weird how the service processor, which is powered through connection to the motherboard was able to remain up and operational when only PS1 (which it swore was absent) was plugged in, yet the MB wouldn't start up. Anyway, with a new cable all was well. Truth be told I'm not certain if that box had always thought it only had one PSU since I installed it. Still, fixed now.

Otherwise I've been pushing my head through the maze of twisty passages, all alike, that are the decisions I'll be making which're coming up in the next few months. I think it's getting a little easier. I won't be erging this evening for two reasons. 1) I want my feet to have a bit of a chance to heal and 2) I've just discovered the series Defying Gravity and I want to see a good few episodes before bed. Especially if it's good.

bofhcam @ 2009-10-08T17:00:00

2009-10-08T16:00:44Z

Urgh. Not a brilliant day. Having done a 55 minute erg session last night and then had a delightful dinner with Kate (with extremely long waits between sitting down, ordering, getting the starter and eventually the main course) I didn't actually get to bed much before 11:45. Not the best prepraration for being in work before 07:00 this morning. At least I was saved the hassle of trying to remember the alarm code for the corridor.

Patching a RHEL5.3 DB box to 5.4 was the order of the day so I went ahead and ran the system_stop.sh scripts supplied by the DBA. Those and the "yum update" commands were the only things which worked as advertised today. After the update I rebooted the box, having been careful to comment out the fstab entries for the volumes on the attached array. The box wouldn't come up cleanly until I physically removed the fibre cables from the back of the box. After that I wasn't able to compile and install the RDAC drivers required due to some weird missing files issue. In the end, close to the tail of my 2 hour downtime window I was able to download a newer version of the RDAC drivers, get them installed, get the grub.conf modified, dash down and plug the cables back in and get the box back up and the services started with 1:45 left on the clock. That was basically the end of my positive day.

Following that I spent some time catching up on email before being granted down time on the server with the dodge power supply issue. Suitably and sensibly shut down I ran the full diagnostics package from within the Web GUI and then (on the assurance that the other things I'd be doing wouldn't reset the host) brought the OS and its five Xen guests back up again. Login in as "sunservice" to the SP I followed the engineers instructions precised and was rewarded with all kinds of confusing options to do with fan speed testing and (noticed out of the corner of my eye) the host resetting, bringing down the Dom0 and all DomUs uncleanly. This was most upsetting. What was more upsetting was that after getting them all back up again the SP was found to have become extremely sluggish when logging in as the normal "root" user. So sluggish in fact that I thought it was broken. When it did allow logins it would quickly begin to scroll up out of memory errors/warning and then eventually reboot itself. It's still doing this now. The engineer is mystified (never a good sign) but has promised to ring back with arrangements for an engineer to come out tomorrow with a few different parts in the hope one of them will be the solution to the seemingly absent power supply issue. Of course, we won't be able to do much trouble shooting if the service processor isn't playing ball now will we?

It's also 17:00 and he hasn't rung yet. I was due to go home at 15:00 today and have a nice relaxing afternoon. That so hasn't happened either. I'm leaving now, having sent him a mail with all the delivery/visiting engineer details he might need. Hopefully it'll be a nice quiet Thursday and I can get some sleep.

bofhcam @ 2009-10-07T16:45:00

2009-10-07T15:45:16Z

So a few presents for Kris arrived today. I'll be taking them with me to the US in a little under two weeks from now. That's going to be lovely (the present giving, not to mention the seeing-Kris-again bit). Another delivery I had was the replacement SAS backplane fan tray for this stupid server which seems to have Issues. I cycled down and replaced the tray in about 30 seconds. Instantly all the service lights went out... but the SP still can't see that it has two power supplies. What's more, with everything shut down I pulled the power out of the PS that it can't see and all was well. But when I pulled the power out of the PS it could see (having replaced the cable for the other PS and ensured that all the LEDs were green on the back of it) the server tanked. Literally stopped dead. It's now my opinion that the culprit is either the motherboard or a power cable between power distribution board and motherboard. Either way, the ball's back in Sun's court, again.

The weather has been pretty crappy all day today. When it hasn't been raining its been humid and just a bit muggy. Neither were great for my run at lunch. I didn't push it too hard as I've got a 55 minute erg this evening which is likely to go most of the way towards killing me. Still, after that there's a dinner out with Kate which should be nice. I think I'll sleep well tonight.

Tomorrow I need to be in for 07:00 so I can start patching a key database server and then reboot it. Of course, once rebooted I have to rebuild the RDAC support which requires you to be in the kernel you want the drivers for before you can use them, so after that there'll be a second reboot. I must remember to comment out the /etc/fstab entries for the stuff being accessed via fibrechannel so nothing goes too whoopsie...

bofhcam @ 2009-10-06T16:40:00

2009-10-06T15:40:12Z

Quiet day today. I didn't make it to the boat house last night on account of just being Too Tired. Instead, I was in bed by 21:15 and asleep within half an hour or less. This did mean I was feeling a little fresher when I got up this morning.

Around 10:00 I headed into town from work to swap out the PDB of the server which is complaining that one of it's (as far as I can see perfectly servicable) PSUs is missing. This didn't help. After some back and forth with the engineer who was with me we decided it had to be the fan tray above the PSUs and are having one delivered to me tomorrow morning. I'll head back to the server room myself and swap the one in the machine out, reset the SP and hope that the faults clear. I'm pretty sure the machine is still being supplied with power from two PSUs. The engineer and I have come to the conclusion that the SP monitors the existence of PS1 through the return from the fan which isn't working. Dumb, but the only explanation we can come up with at the moment based on available evidence. We'll see tomorrow.

I'm going to definitely go to the boat house this evening, and tomorrow evening (when I have dinner in town planned afterwards). I imagine I'll do a weights session this evening unless I find some people who're interested in doing the AT erg which they may have already done last night.

Mostly quiet on other fronts although my brain is still churning about what may be to come in the next few months. Oh, and it's raining on and off which is annoying.