Its saturday night and I just called my boss for the 2nd time

In my last post I think I stated I explained I was on call for work and was stuck at home. yup.. work has been calling me a lot since thursday since one of my servers started acting up.

The problem I just explained to my boss is that DHL is holding on to some memory needed to get my server up again and they do not want to release it until tomorrow morning. It doesn't make any sense for me to boot the server as it will crash again the next time it tries to access the current bad memory.

Now this server is the real boss, what it wants.. it gets (well in 4 hours as stated by the HP support contract), this is an entrprise class server with 12 processors, 27GB of ram and over 5TB of raided fiber channel disks (mostly raid 1 so double that figure). I often try to assign a dollar value to this server but my calculator overflows :-p

yup.. I am just a pawn here waiting for the movers and shakers to do their stuff, this is how I figure the escalation process will go:
me -> my boss -> his boss -> HP -> DHL
Just to get some memory modules on a Saturday night. I am feeling a little uneasy at the moment as I do not know the outcome of this situation and my ass is also on the line if I don't follow the proper procedures.
I think I have everything covered thus far, informed the dba, informed my boss, contact vendor.. the only thing I didn't do was inform the change manager that I would be making this hardware replacement to the system. I will hold my boss responsible for that one, he gave me the go ahead to do it without producing a RFC. Lets hope all turns out well.

I am stuck in my house/The show

Yup.. another public holiday and I am tied to my home as I am on call for my work place and need to stick around somewhere that has internet connectivity so I can VPN in if anything pops up. Anyway enough of work, I went to an art show a few days ago (I'm not really into art but my walls are so plain, so maybe one day I will spruce up my apartment with a piece). Here are some pics of the show:



I have also recently decided that young girls are no longer for me, goodbye young and perky, hello old and saggy. Younger girls are just hot, there is no real material behind them or they hide it really well. Either way older girls are more my speed for now.

This week was pretty much a waste

No work got done at the office.. mainly due to the fact that there was nothing to do. The AC in my office seems to be stuck on high so I have perfected the art of sleeping in my chair in cold dry conditions. To give you an idea of the conditions, the jacket you see me wearing is standard issue at my office and is really meant to be worn in freezer rooms for storing meat.. etc. I figure one of the problems is that the AC is meant to cool a room of 20 people but in this case there is only 1 person maybe 3 on a good day.

This is a picture I took from one of the windows you see behind me. When I am dying of bordom I might turn around and look at the people walking on the street below for a few minutes or so. I work in downtown Kingston, a place not too desired by many. I hear gunshots on occasion and have seen someone get stabbed through my window but once you are inside the building its pretty secure :-p

I should explain why I have so much free time at work :-). I am a systems administrator for enterprise class servers. Most of the machines I oversee only provide the infrastructure that runs business logic so there isn't much need for me to interact with the end users. Don't get it twisted though, when things are failing the torrential rains start and when it rains it pours. So my main activity is just ensuring that things and failing and to prevent/detect future failures with these not so gentle giants.

zzzzZz

What have I been up to lately? I went to an expo last weekend and after that I went to a classic car show :)
At the expo a cute booth girl tried to pick me up for her friend, she flirted with me for a bit and I took her business card and told her I would email her, which I have yet to do :D. I am not really feeling this friend thing but anyways we will give her a chance maybe. Anyway the picture on the left is one of the cars from the show, I didnt realize these cars were still on the road, I some of them had valid registration stickers on them o_0

An update on the office situation:
I have been up at the corporate offices all week thus far, people are all around, its kind of odd. There is no privacy in cubicle life, I can't take my usual afternoon nap anymore. Atleast I can look forward to next week when I return back to my usual desk/officespace downtown.