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What A Fucking Waste Of Time

More bullshit from another asshole with a blog

Holy shake n’ bake hell!
31Jul06

Posted by wafwot

Oopsie! It’s a good goddamned thing I don’t have AADD, or some shit. Today was all about being sharp and getting shit done, and that was nearly impossible. Pass me the bong.

The day ended with a motorcycle accident that happened right in front of the building where I work. Apparently, Evel Knievel revved the engine just before he lost control and planted his ass on the asphalt. We all heard the bike scraping along the road before it stopped at the curb. Everyone at the office stampeded to the window to see what happened. The rider got up and was trying to get the bike off out of the road, but it fell on it’s other side, and he had to lay down on the sidewalk. In typical fashion, the city sent a fleet of emergency vehicles; an ambulance, fire department paramedics, a fire engine, the fire chief, three police cars, and a police motorcycle. You’d have thought there was some nut job holed up with automatic weaponry aimed at hostages, or some such nonsense. It’s a ridiculous waste of resources. Our tax dollars at work! Hell, at least they were preoccupied. Their normal day is probably spent writing tickets for drivers doing 4½ millimeters an hour over the speed limit. A co-worker snapped these photos: this one, this one, this one, and this one. Careful, though. These images exceed 2 MB each.

Before the excitement of emergency vehicles, we spent a busy day on the phones. On Friday, a RAID array on one of our shared hosting servers shit the bed. Two drives out of four failed. On a RAID10 this isn’t supposed to happen. As long as there’s one drive in each set of the array, the RAID should be okay. Even engineers at Seagate were stumped. Basically, the server was down, and down hard. It only took a couple hours to realize that the server would have to be rebuilt and data restored from backup. To make matters worse, the sysadmins told us that the backups on the RAID were also lost. This means that an 8-month old off-site backup would have to be restored. Any web site changes and mail accounts that customers created within the past 8 months would have to be re-created. (All the backup scare got me to set up rsnapshot to backup this domain and the others I own. Thanks Dustin!)

I feel for the sysadmins. Their whole weekend was shot working on building a new server, installing software, and restoring things as best they could. I got a call yesterday afternoon to come in and do some tier two support and help out with getting the domains current. I spent five hours at the office before heading home. Overtime, baby! I went in an hour early today to take care of the Hosting ticket queue before the fun started. By the time 8:00am rolled around, the phones just lit up. Holy fuck, the phones didn’t stop ringing for hours! I was in the support phone queue for two and a half hours before I was told to stay off the phones and help the techs with issues they bring me. I handled issues as they came, and dealt with my hosting tickets the rest of the day. I was never so happy to see 5:00pm. I had enough excitement for one day. I’ll probably be asleep before midnight. Let’s hope tomorrow is quieter.

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Officially Old
23Jul06

Posted by wafwot

wafwot_headstone.jpg Yesterday was my fortieth birthday, and I celebrated it by doing nothing. Tina baked a cheesecake using my East Coast Cheesecake recipe the day before, and we spent Saturday just trying to keep cool in the Devil’s ass crack that is this goddamned heat wave.

I probably shouldn’t think about being forty. Lots of people before me have hit this milestone. Turning forty, though, doesn’t seem as traumatic as turning thirty did. In 1996, I cut off my pony tail and got an earring in a vain attempt appear younger. On that fateful day, I wore all black and mourned my youth. But there was none of that ridiculousness this year. I guess I’m all “growed” up, eh? Nothing to fear. But I can’t help but think forty is old. I mean, it is only a number, right? Here’s some other numbers: 480 months, 2,087 weeks, 14,610 days, 350,640 hours, 21,038,400 minutes, 1,262,304,000 seconds. Now 40 years sounds like a long time. No denying it. Forty is old.

I remember being in high school and telling my friends that forty was too old. I told them when I turn forty, I wanted them to kill me. I’d rather be dead than be 40 years old. But you know, it’s not that bad, and I’m glad those friends figured I was kidding. Either that, or they forgot, or don’t know where I am. That’s a good thing.

I definitely don’t feel like forty. My body sure feels every bit of forty, though. There’s dull pain in my joints, back pain, it takes me longer to get moving in the morning then it used to, and I’m pretty sure I’m coming down with Alzhiemer's. It could happen. My maternal grandfather had it.

However, I can’t help to think about my own mortality. Ever since My Dad died last year, I’ve been thinking about my own mortality. My paternal grandfather died at 62, my father died at 59, my uncle died at 57. I figure I have about 20 more years to set goals and try to meet them. While my great-grandfather died at 28, my great-great-grandfather died in 1929 at the age of 68, so maybe there’s some hope.

There’s no fighting it. Now that I’m forty, I’m officially on the road to becoming a full on curmudgeon. I’m on the doorstep of becoming a grumpy old fart… that’s not so bad, is it? Then again, I get to look forward to doctors probing my ass for polyps, prostate exams, and continued frequent and slowed urination. Yippee!

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Phoenix North
21Jul06

Posted by wafwot

Fucking hot! Fuck, it’s hot. The television weather wienies said it was going to be a hot weekend, and they were dead on with that forecast today. As I drove into work this morning, the clock/temperature display at the bank toggled between 7:20 and 70°F.

Our office is not air conditioned. There’s always a breeze on North Whidbey Island, and the normal summertime highs are in the low-to-mid 70s… except for those three or four days when there’s a high pressure fart bubble that pushes its way up the Nation's ass crack and bursts. It makes the Pacific Northwest a moist and sweltering butt cleavage of heat. It happens every year, and today was the first day of our annual sweatfest. It turns our office into a Nazi concentration camp oven.

When I walked into my office, my “travel alarm clock-turned-Official company thermometer” read 81°F. That was only the beginning. By mid afternoon, the Official Temperature was 88°F, and a warm pool of ass sweat was collecting under my chair. By the time I left for the day, the battery-powered thermometer was sitting at 91°F. Holy pan-fried technician fillets, it’s a scorcher!

I got a call from a former employee today. I’ve talked about my soy-eating, crazy-thought friend in my blog before. He’s infamous for such antics as the Sick Tech, and the Tearful Goodbye. I decided to drive out to his place after work today for two reasons: a 45-minute trip in air conditioning, and… gardening tips. He lives in La Conner, where there’s a pretty cool bridge called Rainbow Bridge (not to be confused with the Rainbow Bridge). I was shocked to see he lives with a small horse named Phenom. This animal probably eats more a day than I do. They call the dog a baby cow, and I can see why. It was good to see Jake. Since he knows how hot our office can get, he had to taunt me with his 69°F air conditioned office where he works. Whatever, Jake. I got the last laugh, though, with my Log Art. We shared some gardening tips and played a few games of Ghost Recon with another friend of his, before I decided to head home.

It was 85°F when I got home, so no immediate relief from the constant sizzling that is my ass. I positioned fans around me as Tina reheated some leftover hamburgers from barbecuing last night. We just finished a bowl of ice cream here at 11:30pm, and the temperatures are finally in the 77°F range.

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