Because who doesn’t want to shoot stuff? Yes… pic is crappy, but I only have a cellphone and min light.

pewpew

So yesterday I had to me delivered a brand new R60k server at work. A server that, in my opinion, has no function and no need. This really incenses me and I’ll try to explain why in the course of this entry.

This year my company has gone on what appears to be a really aggressive cost cutting push, slashing budgets across the board (or so I’ve been led to understand) and retrenching employees from many of our business units. IT got hit quite hard, having 5 CIOs retrenched and only replacing them with 2 positions available as part of the corporate restructuring. Add to this an entire department was dissolved and quite a number of people resigned seeking greener pastures; people who I’m not sure will ever be replaced forcing the work to be distributed amongst the rest of us. The scary thing about all this is that very little information has come down from the top, leaving us “workers” mostly in the dark forced to contemplate the outlook and have the blanks filled in with typical water-cooler and smoking balcony talk. Leaving your people in ignorance in matters such as these is not good for employee and company morale.

But anyways, back to my story. This background is like this: one of our company’s core business functionality runs almost exclusively on 2 application servers (glorified PCs really — lets call them OldA and OldB); each performing a different role. If either of these servers were to tip over there would be a rather large crisis and a lot of screaming people. Thus it was decided a DR solution had to be built and implemented. This task mostly fell to me as a learning experience with the aid of my team. So we had 2 older servers (I’ll call these BeefA and BeefB) that were just lying around, not being used, earmarked to replace the 2 existing servers (don’t forget — glorified PCs) making the existing servers the backup. If you’re still following: BeefA replaces OldA thus making OldA the backup, and BeefB replaces OldB making OldB the backup.

BeefA and BeefB are both decently specced servers. Dual CPU, Dual core, 6x 72GB scsi300 drives, dual gigabit nics; BeefA with 6GB ram BeefB with 2GB. Aside from the RAM either servers is specced well enough to serve both OldA and OldB’s functions; which ultimately was the plan… until yesterday that is. The servers are physically identical, so we could easily move hardware as well. OldA’s\BeefA’s core function was to be done away with and the server decommissioned later in the year, this means that any peripheral functionality would eventually be migrated from BeefA to BeefB, enabling BeefA to act as backup for BeefB. Until the time that this happened OldA and OldB would stand as part of the DRP.

In step the powers that be, and hence I have a brand new server delivered to me along with a “request” to set it up. What? Did I forget to mention that yesterday was also the first I’d even heard of this brand new server? Yea, I really love it when they forget to inform the people doing the actual work. Judging by the forwarded email I received, this server has been in the pipeline since February. Right, so my natural response was “WTF?!” and then “what’s this for?”. Then I find out what this server is actually for, it’s to replace OldB. But wait, what about BeefA and BeefB and the work going into making those the live servers and OldA and OldB the backup?

Bear in mind how I started this post, we now have a nice shiny R60k doorstop. And, all this happening amongst serious budget cuts. I seriously don’t know how this stuff gets past? Unfortunately I’m just a peon, someone who does what he’s told, who hasn’t even been at the company for a year and essentially just a trainee. My opinion doesn’t really count for much, and I’m not about to get myself embroiled in the corporate politics surrounding such decisions.

This is a prime example of some seriously broken communication. Had someone bothered to CC me into the emails (peons aren’t part of the managerial decision circulars) I could have had the opportunity to tell them they’re wasting their money for no good reason. I do hope I’m wrong in all this and this server actually has a different purpose, but I’m pretty sure I’m on the money in this regard.

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This past Friday saw me take a leave day and head off on my bike to Zwartkops for the day for my much anticipated and long awaited training day. The day featured some interesting road manoeuvres and a fair amount of track riding; lessons all delivered by 2 highly skilled instructors.  So I finally got to test some of the capabilities of the beast I ride and what a joy it was. Road riding really pales in comparison; about the only thing it seems you can do in Joburg is go fast in a straight line, a technique that any monkey can master and judging by the way some people ride on our roads I’d say we have quite a number of monkeys in training.

The day started off by doing some hard braking and swerving between cones. I managed to lock my back wheel twice leaving nice black lines on the tar, at least I really gave that front wheel some work. I’m glad I bought dual compound tyres otherwise I’d be a bit pissed off about creating flat spots. The day progressed to circles and tight turns, something most bikers can’t seem to do without putting their feet down. I only have a problem with doing a full lock right hand turn where my throttle hand is jammed against the tank, otherwise it was easy enough. The day of course progressed to the track riding and various techniques. They sent us around the track without any brakes. Having to shed speed by weaving as you rapidly approach the hairpin directly after the fastest corner on the track is a bit of a hair-raising experience. Fortunately, there were no accidents to put a damper on the day, though a few people did manage to run off the track.

Of course there was me, in full riding gear on what was not a particularly cool day trying not to get dehydrated. Though toward the end of the day I was starting to get a cramp in my right leg, I guess I didn’t quite drink enough. Hanging off the bike must have contributed to the cramps as I was concentrating on form as much as riding. Having the instructors ask when I’m going to introduce my sliders to the pavement was a bit of a laugh though. Try as I might I just don’t have the confidence to go into a corner at full tilt to achieve that wonderful scrape, especially not on my first day at the track. I did manage to head into the final corner a bit faster than I was comfortable with, as the exit is somewhat obscured by the pit-lane barrier. Being forced to tighten your line and the bike over harder mid-corner is a great learning experience and also a huge amount of fun.

I guess this means I’ll be marking off a whole bunch of track days on my calendar.

So a few days ago I wake up as usual; this usually consists of hearing my alarm, promptly deactivating it and only stumbling out of bed a half hour later. Clearly I am not a morning person, and this just wasn’t my morning it seems. I often sleep with my mouth open it appears so I generally go and spit out all the crap that has dried over night… charming I know. Well that morning into the basin I spat saliva laced with blood… delightful I know.

I have in the past had nosebleeds while asleep (waking up in a pool of blood is never fun) but upon inspection it appeared this was not the case. I’m not a hypochondriac at all and normally I’ll ignore medical problems in the hope that my body will sort itself out and I won’t have to fork out my hard earned funds to some guy that studied more than I did :/. This wasn’t one of times though as I hadn’t been feeling all that great lately; fatigue, nausea, etc. So a few hours later I carted myself off to the doctor, for the third time in a month. As it turns out he was slightly less clueless than me. So a vial of blood was drawn and sent off to some lab to determine what possibly ails me. A costly affair, though I’d been meaning to get a blood test for quite a while now, so not all bad.

Expecting a longer delay, imagine my surprise when I got a call yesterday informing me my results were back already. Fast service in this country? I didn’t even know it was possible to run all of those tests so quickly, I guess that shows my lack of knowledge about the medical field. I suppose private health care makes a difference, you really pay for it. The kindly receptionist proceeds to pencil me in for an appointment later in the day and a few hours later off I go… again.

Arriving at their doctor’s office I walk in with a fair amount of trepidation, wait 10 minutes and proceed to the consulting room. The doctor walks in with a rather dour look on his face and thick file in his hand; very reassuring. Expecting some bad news and a cocktail of really expensive medication I was pleasantly surprised to discover that there is nothing wrong with me, I am in fact Gordon Freeman.

Just a quick addition to yesterday’s post. There is giant pothole in my road where it appears that a water pipe has burst. This is now the third time it’s happened since I moved in. It’s been there for about 2 weeks now, which is great. At night It’s also really hard to see, since there are no street lamps at that section of the road, so it’s pretty much invisible until you’re right on top of it, which almost caught me out the first time as it hadn’t been there earlier in the day.

It really sucks when they turn our water on and off for a week to fix the damn thing.

If you live in Joburg, and you drive around at all, I’m sure you’ve noticed that our roads are increasingly becoming littered with little runnels tracking across the city. If you haven’t, you either don’t leave home much or you live in some remote dorpie where smoke signals are still used for communication (in which case I have no idea how you’re reading this). To the best of my knowledge these little ditches are caused by Neotel doing their thing laying fibre everywhere. In my opinion the actual process hasn’t been too disruptive; in general I’ve noticed they have been dug and the fibre pulled within a day or two.

However, It’s a good thing we haven’t had too much rain lately because I’m sure some of these runnels would have become veritable canyons by now. As it is, many of them are increasingly nearing the level of outright road-hazard that desperately need to be filled in. I actually managed to slide both wheels over one of these things on my bike; though that was mostly due to the giant sand dune that had been piled on top.

Similarly there is now a nice ditch cut out of the road on my daily route. And by nice, I mean, bloody huge. It’s probably about 3″ deep now and about the width of an average sized car wheel. In other words, if you hit that thing at a decent speed, you’re likely to pop some tyres and buckle your rims. I’m just glad I saw them cutting it a week ago otherwise I would probably be buying 2 new tyres about now.

Everyone loves the classics.

So it’s been over 2 weeks since I returned my Xbox. I phoned the guys today and was told that I needed to wait 14 – 21 days before they would give me a response. That’s really nice and helpful, but it was much what I had anticipated before they even answered the phone.

Of course this situation begs the question; what the hell are these guys doing? They tell me it’s booked in with Microsoft, but I somehow have my doubts since I know that Microsoft do an immediate swap for this particular issue. All they need to do is plug it in and turn it on to check. So where is this thing? Sitting on some shelf at HifiCorp or sitting on someone’s desk at Microsoft?

I can at least give Microsoft the benefit of the doubt considering how rife modding is. I’m sure Microsoft are wont to check these things nowadays. Still, 2 weeks?

…because everyone needs some; and I have hundreds of these things.

Well Wordpress decided to release a new version a few days ago. So I guess I can start by testing one of the new features they’ve included… a gallery:

Hmmm… doesn’t quite seem to work the way one would expect. Oh well.