MikeBrum.com

I mentioned that my RAID controller was failing and before it totally shit the bed and hosed all the data on my disks in the RAID set, I pulled it and plugged one in directly to the motherboard.

About a week later I realized my Outlook mail files weren’t backing up to the backup disk in place (I run a nightly backup script I wrote to ensure all of my data is pulled off the RAID set to an external drive). For some reason, the core file was never updating it’s modified date and thus the backup was never triggering.

After running a chkdsk on the drive, some errors were found and rebuilt. After that, my Outlook mail file was very wonky. I ran a repair on that and I ended up losing about a week’s worth of email. I guess it could have been worse. This is to date the worse data loss that I’ve suffered in some 6+ years. I guess it’s not “too” bad all things considered.

Everything’s humming along now and I have a new RAID card on order and once that’s in I’ll pop it into the case and rebuild the RAID set. It’ll take a couple of hours to build, but only about 10 minutes of my time. The rest is all automated.

In other news, I feel really “off” right now. I’m sure it’ll pass by the time I get up, but I think I’m just going to crash for now. I need to get my ass motivated – maybe that’ll help. While some aspects of my personal life are going better than I’d ever imagined just a few months back, I’ve not been too productive in others. I hope to get that resolved before it becomes a “problem”.

I’m not the best when it comes to self-motivation.

Maybe I should remember what ol’ Jack Burton always says…

This week has been busy. I’ve been embroiled in an ongoing issue with a very large customer that’s been having some completely non-product-related problems. But since we’re looking to close a very large sale with them and we’re one of a few vendors left they’re choosing from, our sales group has kept us engaged in this issue for far too long.

It looks like we’ll finally be able to distance ourselves from this issue now and I’m finally breathing a sigh of relief.

On Tuesday we drove down to Providence and hung out with Pat for a while and then with Nick once he got out of work. That was fun, but kept us out until about 2. I’m far from a rockstar and crashing at 2 wears on my ability to function (especially during high-stress weeks).

Before I forget, here’s a picture from the park on Friday:

No Seizures Allowed!

I think I’ll end up hanging out in/around Providence again tonight and then head up to Haverhill tomorrow for a party of sorts. It should be beautiful weather and I’ll try to get in the pool a bit.

Sunday should be my first tattoo work since Marria put those dots on my leg (gotta get the rest of those filled too!). I have no idea when that was, but I’m thinking it was around a year ago. I have such a bad concept of time… and a shitty memory to boot.

Meh… I’ll work with what I got.

Today took a change of direction. We were supposed to play D&D and I spent a bunch of time yesterday wrapping up the adventure. Unfortunately, Pat got “stuck” in New Hampshire until late and he’s not going to be back in time to play. Next weekend I’m busy so we won’t be playing then either. Meh.

Yesterday was a decent day. We got up early, shot over to Ikea and I bought a new coffee table. It’s pretty nice and fills out the room well. I needed something and it fits the bill nicely.

On Friday, we went to Canobie Lake Park. It was a good time and we all had fun. We didn’t do much on Friday night, which was fine – it was a busy day.

The past week has been good – it’s been Shark Week on Discovery and I’ve watched a decent amount of TV. I’m on a big shark kick right now. Given all the things I could obsess over, this isn’t a bad one.

Corinne gets back into Boston tonight and tomorrow it’s Canobe Lake Park. (guess which I’m more excited about)

I’ve never been there, but by all accounts it’s nothing too spectacular. It’s our “summer outing” for work – so I’m not going to pass up the free day off and the chance to get sunburnt with thousands of people I don’t know at a sub-par amusement park.

Who could say no to that?!?!

Right now I’m a bit sleepy. I consumed copious amounts of ice cream that was brought into work. Mmm… free dairy. Now I’m all bloated. I <3 ice cream.

Not as much as gummy fish… but they are my first true love after all.

I’m a bit wound up right now. Ok… a lot. No worries. Nobody calls after 3:30, so I can just kick back, play Sudoku on my phone and doze off around 4:30.

Not too shabby.

I stopped into the drug store before work to get some crayons and deodorant (seriously). I happened to be wearing my IWasCured Guerilla Suspension Team shirt and the lady that rang me up asked, “What were you cured of?”

I never expect people to actually read my shirts, let alone inquire about them, so I just mumbled something about it being an “organization I’ve helped out with” and left it at that. Hmm.

So at lunch today, someone then asked “guerilla suspension team – what’s that?” One my friends that I work with is familiar with suspensions to some degree and she just said, “This isn’t a lunch topic” and it gave me a nice out.

The odd thing is, I’ve worn this shirt countless times – many of which to work here and at my last job – and nobody has ever asked me about it. Then, today, I get it twice in one day. Very strange.

Maybe I should start saying that my night job is reprimanded large apes at the zoo when they misbehave.

I received a new server for my test environment at work yesterday. It’s a beefy Dell PowerEdge SC1420. Despite some very impressive hardware stats, this thing has been a pain in the ass to get installed. It seems that Dell has concocted the most unbelievably ass-backwards way of installing the OS. I honestly don’t understand why it’s been made to be this complicated.

After my initial confusion I decided to RTFM and it’s working… but it’s still completely unnecessary.

Last week I set up a laptop from scratch and it was nice and easy – exactly what you’d expect for installing an OS and software on a clean machine.

Anyway, I’m just waiting for that to finish before I can start setting it up. I have SQL Server in the wings and I’m hoping to get a ton of OSes to install on VMWare.

In other computer-related news, I think the RAID adapter in my home computer is dying… which is bad. I’m going to have to figure that out and buy one soon. Meh. I’d rather be saving up for my Hawaii trip in September.

Last week was a busy week. There’s no other way to explain it. This weekend was busy too. Despite all that, it’s been a good time.

We got to bed last night around 9:30~10:00. Corinne flew out to Arizona this morning at 6:00. I volunteered to drive her to the airport since the T wouldn’t be running and a taxi would have been a huge expense for no reason.

I think we got up at 3:30 this morning.

I got about an hour of sleep after getting back home, but my internal clock is all sorts of fucked up.

Tonight’s gonna be an early night… that’s for sure.

In the meantime, I’m going to get back to work and do some programming. Wheee…

This weekend was busy. I have a bunch of messages to respond to, but I wanted to post a quick entry from some pics I took on Sunday. We went up to Revere Beach where they were holding this sand castle contest. It was pretty amazing. I only had my phone with me, so the pics aren’t that great quality. Despite that, you get an idea how amazing the pieces were!

The beach itself was packed, and I hate huge crowds (esp when they’re huge crowds of largely ignorant people… which you tend to get when in public), but I was able to ignore most of them. That and the rest of the weekend was a good time though.

Today was busy, same as yesterday. The only thing that saves me is that I’ve been able to leave the office early this week – even though I log in remotely from home.

On the way into work I saw something amusing in the car in front of me…

I’m fortunate that my sunglasses are polarized and I have a polarized lense for my camera. It makes things like glare a non-issue. Last week I saw a lady with a HUGE afro that was likely getting crushed by the ceiling of the car. Unfortunately, I didn’t have my camera on me though.

It’s been rather rainy here the past few days. Luckily that’s moving out tonight and I can pull the top down tomorrow in the morning. I also should be getting a window bag tomorrow in the mail, so that’ll be nice to have!

I’m eventually going to want to get some waterproof seat covers for the front and the back, but that’ll be an expense for next year most likely.

Time to get going – I’m going to try to make something out of the evening.

I got home yesterday and went through my usual routine. Once that was done, I wanted to burn a DVD, so I got that going and went to watch some TV until it was done. In the middle of Married with Children (one of my favorite all-time shows, btw), I noticed that my PC had crashed and it was sitting on a strange screen.

Turns out that the RAID array was in a Critical state and needed some attention. I ultimately ended up rebuilding it (a 2.5 hour process) and it came up no problem. I got everything booted fine, tossed the incomplete DVD and burned the disk the second time through. Very frustrating and somewhat scary. Luckily even if one disk dies, I still have the second in the array along with a nightly backup to fall back on.

I ended up watching Dark Angel on sci-fi for some 4 hours last night. It was a Jessica Alba fest with her basically running around being hot (which she tends to do rather well). There are a few goofy plot holes, but overall entertaining. It couldn’t be that bad since I watched it all night long.

I’m now at work and the only pending issue I have is someone asking me questions that don’t have anything at all to do with the product I support. I just use Google – why is that so hard for people to do?

PEBKAC