The Long Day con't

The maintenance window for my work has come & gone: the power distributors were replaced handily and all is well.

I used some of the extra time tonight to get a new blade chassis racked up and cabled. I still need to prod the network engineers to update the port settings on the Cisco switches but I can work on that tomorrow, then finish the config of the new chassis. Since the blades to install in it haven't arrived from California yet, there's no rush.

I spent a couple of hours sitting in my car, reading "Peter the Great: His Life & World." I'm on page 502 of 950 currently, just getting up to the part where Peter is about to crush Charles XII's invading army near Poltava in the Ukraine. A bicyclist stopped to ask for directions and immediately noticed my book. As it turns, he's Russian, working in Virginia as a lifeguard at some local sports complex and was utterly thrilled that anyone in the US had any interest at all in anything Russian, especially pre-Soviet history. I didn't tell him I was Canadian: he was so delighted, I feared telling him I wasn't American would just break his heart. (See, I'm still a nice person, despite the trauma done to my soul by living in DC for 13 years.)

In all, it was a productive night at the data center although I'm not looking forward to being on the front lines tomorrow morning as customers start using the systems updated overnight. Thursday mornings are never pretty and I have no reason to believe this will be an exception.

The Long Day con't

The maintenance window for my work has come & gone: the power distributors were replaced handily and all is well.

I used some of the extra time tonight to get a new blade chassis racked up and cabled. I still need to prod the network engineers to update the port settings on the Cisco switches but I can work on that tomorrow, then finish the config of the new chassis. Since the blades to install in it haven't arrived from California yet, there's no rush.

I spent a couple of hours sitting in my car, reading "Peter the Great: His Life & World." I'm on page 502 of 950 currently, just getting up to the part where Peter is about to crush Charles XII's invading army near Poltava in the Ukraine. A bicyclist stopped to ask for directions and immediately noticed my book. As it turns, he's Russian, working in Virginia as a lifeguard at some local sports complex and was utterly thrilled that anyone in the US had any interest at all in anything Russian, especially pre-Soviet history. I didn't tell him I was Canadian: he was so delighted, I feared telling him I wasn't American would just break his heart. (See, I'm still a nice person, despite the trauma done to my soul by living in DC for 13 years.)

In all, it was a productive night at the data center although I'm not looking forward to being on the front lines tomorrow morning as customers start using the systems updated overnight. Thursday mornings are never pretty and I have no reason to believe this will be an exception.