Home again home again

I’m briefly home again, before flying out on Sunday night. I was the victim of my own success last week, and killed off enough of the four work items that I was supposed to do that I earned a fifth bullet on the “tasks for fdmts” section of the big boss’s whiteboard. In the interest of discretion, let’s leave it at the fact that it’s gonna be a challenge, and I wanted to be there next week to get started as soon as possible. Plus, hey – in a recession it’s always wise to line up the next gig before you leave.

Technically, last week ended with a bit of a whimper. I screwed up right at the end, and left myself locked out of a nearly fully configured server. Apparently I fat-fingered the root password twice in a row. It’s entirely possible to reset it, but that involves booting from DVD – the server doesn’t have a DVD drive – blah blah and it was the last day and I was low on time. I’ll be back on Monday and stick take my penalty hour then.

Similarly, in trying to build my 50TB cheap-o scratch space out of off warrantee and older disks (frankenSAN), I learned a lot about the limitations of OS X, software RAID, HFS+, and 32 bit chips. I did not have the triumphant end of the week that I would have liked. I need to take a lesson from cariaso in quitting while I’m ahead rather than expanding the scope of the work to fill the available time.

Got off the plane at 4pm yesterday and went straight to meet redmed at work. From there, we had a pleasant evening listening to the Boston Baroque do Handel’s Messiah. While it’s a mighty cultural touchstone and one of the Signs of the Season, I don’t think I’ll be signing up for a full performance of that piece again any time soon. Three hours of good music – but it was far from the raw genius that was the Creation last year. Don’t get me wrong: I think that the ensemble did as well as anyone could with it. I had the impression of “flashes of brilliance” rather than a sustained glow.

Leave a Reply

You can use these HTML tags

<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>

  

  

  

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.