Working Hard

I'm not ignoring LJ, I'm just busy. Very busy.

After a week of relatively slack work, the office gods have unleashed their fury upon me. In the past two days, I've been handed three new and very large projects with ridiculously short time lines. I'm still training the new team to take over my Sarb-Ox evidence collection tasks so everything on that list takes twice as long. Two of my team are out of vacation, one called in sick today with a migraine so I'm also juggling daily tasks with the lot.

And I currently crave a hamburger. At least one. Dunno why, I just do.

Thank the gods for Ann here at work who has saved my ass on so many technical writing issues that they are beyond number. And my director Kim who taps me when needed but never frivolously or needlessly. And for kent4str for keeping me fed (although I have to do the cleaning & laundry myself) and cuyahogarvr for travelling to DC rather than us going to Cleveland, thus giving me more time to deal with the office issues. And tomorrow is payday.

More later.

Working Hard

I'm not ignoring LJ, I'm just busy. Very busy.

After a week of relatively slack work, the office gods have unleashed their fury upon me. In the past two days, I've been handed three new and very large projects with ridiculously short time lines. I'm still training the new team to take over my Sarb-Ox evidence collection tasks so everything on that list takes twice as long. Two of my team are out of vacation, one called in sick today with a migraine so I'm also juggling daily tasks with the lot.

And I currently crave a hamburger. At least one. Dunno why, I just do.

Thank the gods for Ann here at work who has saved my ass on so many technical writing issues that they are beyond number. And my director Kim who taps me when needed but never frivolously or needlessly. And for kent4str for keeping me fed (although I have to do the cleaning & laundry myself) and cuyahogarvr for travelling to DC rather than us going to Cleveland, thus giving me more time to deal with the office issues. And tomorrow is payday.

More later.

Gay Marriage In Canada Preserved!

The House of Commons in the federal Parliament of Canada voted at 3:25 PM this afternoon on a resolution whether to revisit the issue of gay marriage. It would not have affected marriage per se, but could have opened the door to a renewed long & painful debate.

The vote was 175 to 123 against re-opening discussion. Gay marriage as an issue for Parliament is closed.

PS. Hmm... seven abstentions. I wonder who...

Gay Marriage In Canada Preserved!

The House of Commons in the federal Parliament of Canada voted at 3:25 PM this afternoon on a resolution whether to revisit the issue of gay marriage. It would not have affected marriage per se, but could have opened the door to a renewed long & painful debate.

The vote was 175 to 123 against re-opening discussion. Gay marriage as an issue for Parliament is closed.

PS. Hmm... seven abstentions. I wonder who...

Saturday Ice Skating, Washington DC

OK, not actually in DC proper but in the Maryland 'burbs of DC.

A handful of folks are going ice skating in Wheaton this coming Saturday (Dec. 9), for the 11:30 AM to 1:30 PM block. Rink location, skate rental info and such are all at:
http://www.mc-mncppc.org/parks/enterprise/ice/wheaton/index.shtm

Before skating though, we're going to rendez-vous at 10 AM at the Tastee Diner in Silver Spring (8601 Cameron Street), a couple of short blocks from the Silver Spring Metro station. I'm sure we can arrange a ride from there to the rink for those of Metro riders.

So far, we have me, cuyahogarvr and Jeff M. & friend. All are welcome to join us!

Saturday Ice Skating, Washington DC

OK, not actually in DC proper but in the Maryland 'burbs of DC.

A handful of folks are going ice skating in Wheaton this coming Saturday (Dec. 9), for the 11:30 AM to 1:30 PM block. Rink location, skate rental info and such are all at:
http://www.mc-mncppc.org/parks/enterprise/ice/wheaton/index.shtm

Before skating though, we're going to rendez-vous at 10 AM at the Tastee Diner in Silver Spring (8601 Cameron Street), a couple of short blocks from the Silver Spring Metro station. I'm sure we can arrange a ride from there to the rink for those of Metro riders.

So far, we have me, cuyahogarvr and Jeff M. & friend. All are welcome to join us!

Wednesday Night C1 Dancing

Last night's C1 workshop was a special treat, but for unfortunate reasons.

Doran McBroom has been calling our regular Wednesday night C1 sessions but his father suffered a stroke and subsequently passed away over the weekend. John Marshall stepped in to call for us rather than have the group cancel dancing for a third consecutive week.

Dancing C1 has always been something of a workout but this time was an exceptional mental challenge. John ran us through a number of figures and tips and pushed us on a the usual concepts: stretch, concentric, magic columns, blocks, O and butterfly formations. I think it went well: we were clearly defeated by some figures but John gently guided us through and offered a number of pointers which should help our future success rate.

Idiot that I am, however, I forgot to turn on my tape recorder to catch some of the figures for later analysis. I made a point of bringing it as well as extra tapes, but they remained in my backpack in the trunk of the car. Doh!

By the end of it all, my feet hurt and my head felt full, but I wouldn't change a thing: this is the sort of mental exercise which I love most about square dancing (at least in the upper levels) and I'd vastly prefer to crash a square in this workshop than on the dance floor at next February's AC/DC.

I really have to get off my lazy butt to try composing some of my own C1 choreography: I've done some of the early --and admittedly simplistic-- analysis but I'm not going to get anywhere if I don't start at all.

Wednesday Night C1 Dancing

Last night's C1 workshop was a special treat, but for unfortunate reasons.

Doran McBroom has been calling our regular Wednesday night C1 sessions but his father suffered a stroke and subsequently passed away over the weekend. John Marshall stepped in to call for us rather than have the group cancel dancing for a third consecutive week.

Dancing C1 has always been something of a workout but this time was an exceptional mental challenge. John ran us through a number of figures and tips and pushed us on a the usual concepts: stretch, concentric, magic columns, blocks, O and butterfly formations. I think it went well: we were clearly defeated by some figures but John gently guided us through and offered a number of pointers which should help our future success rate.

Idiot that I am, however, I forgot to turn on my tape recorder to catch some of the figures for later analysis. I made a point of bringing it as well as extra tapes, but they remained in my backpack in the trunk of the car. Doh!

By the end of it all, my feet hurt and my head felt full, but I wouldn't change a thing: this is the sort of mental exercise which I love most about square dancing (at least in the upper levels) and I'd vastly prefer to crash a square in this workshop than on the dance floor at next February's AC/DC.

I really have to get off my lazy butt to try composing some of my own C1 choreography: I've done some of the early --and admittedly simplistic-- analysis but I'm not going to get anywhere if I don't start at all.

Is it the weekend yet?

The day was long but productive.

On Wednesday afternoon, I was assigned to a committee which is cleaning up 16,000 potential Sarb-Ox issues on our production servers. These are all very trivial items: we took care of the major ones a long, long time ago. Still, upper management wants an utterly sanitized comprehensive report so even these little items --mostly archival or legacy files whose ownership varies from that of their parent directory-- addressed. My role is to clean up all of these items for my particular server group, about 4,000 entries. My implementation plan must be complete by 12/14/06. Yay.

One of the huge server groups and UNIX business divisions is being dissolved; my group is inheriting two groups of Sun Microsystems V480 servers, one of 20 and one of 16. I've been assigned to the transition of the group of 16. Now I need to get space, power and network connections for the lot, as well as Veritas licenses. I hope to get the worst of this planning done within a week; the business users haven't given us a deadline for completion. My group of servers will replace retiring E450 models; while I have a fondness for the E450 model, they are large (half a cabinet), heavy (205 lbs) and not particularly powerful by modern standards (4 CPUs, 400 MHz each, 4 GB of RAM). The newer machines we're inheriting will be vastly better and more compact.

My documentation project continues apace; I finished off two new standards docs, obtained signatures for many others and am rather delighted with the progress of our tech writers. The NIS+ servers are all decommissioned and will be removed from the data center in the next couple of weeks. The Raptor firewalls are about to be decommissioned and the hardware removed by the end of the month. Seven new Sarb-Ox evidence requests arrived this week: all have been dispatched appropriately. Numerous tickets required approval from our team: I've tackled all assigned to me. Several work tickets were assigned to me for completion; all have been performed successfully. Multiple meetings came and went each day this week and I've survived them all, more or less.

And cuyahogarvr has arrived Thursday night to spend several days chez nous. The day ends on a high note. :-)

Is it the weekend yet?

The day was long but productive.

On Wednesday afternoon, I was assigned to a committee which is cleaning up 16,000 potential Sarb-Ox issues on our production servers. These are all very trivial items: we took care of the major ones a long, long time ago. Still, upper management wants an utterly sanitized comprehensive report so even these little items --mostly archival or legacy files whose ownership varies from that of their parent directory-- addressed. My role is to clean up all of these items for my particular server group, about 4,000 entries. My implementation plan must be complete by 12/14/06. Yay.

One of the huge server groups and UNIX business divisions is being dissolved; my group is inheriting two groups of Sun Microsystems V480 servers, one of 20 and one of 16. I've been assigned to the transition of the group of 16. Now I need to get space, power and network connections for the lot, as well as Veritas licenses. I hope to get the worst of this planning done within a week; the business users haven't given us a deadline for completion. My group of servers will replace retiring E450 models; while I have a fondness for the E450 model, they are large (half a cabinet), heavy (205 lbs) and not particularly powerful by modern standards (4 CPUs, 400 MHz each, 4 GB of RAM). The newer machines we're inheriting will be vastly better and more compact.

My documentation project continues apace; I finished off two new standards docs, obtained signatures for many others and am rather delighted with the progress of our tech writers. The NIS+ servers are all decommissioned and will be removed from the data center in the next couple of weeks. The Raptor firewalls are about to be decommissioned and the hardware removed by the end of the month. Seven new Sarb-Ox evidence requests arrived this week: all have been dispatched appropriately. Numerous tickets required approval from our team: I've tackled all assigned to me. Several work tickets were assigned to me for completion; all have been performed successfully. Multiple meetings came and went each day this week and I've survived them all, more or less.

And cuyahogarvr has arrived Thursday night to spend several days chez nous. The day ends on a high note. :-)