Evidently the weekend’s activities weren’t as successful as originally thought. As well as this palm-to-armpit cast thanks to being rammed by a canoe full of idiot girl scouts, I also seem to have totally fucked up the light over the garage. As of yesterday, there is no power at all in the garage, not to the new light, nor to the inside light and plug socket. And the circuit breaker is not tripped. I even tried resetting it just to see if that would help. I swear there is a secret switch in the house for the power to the garage, and we’re switching it without realizing it.
Category: Rant
God save me from impatient installers
I’ve spent the last couple of months doing an all-singing, all-dancing automatic upgrader for our customers sites. This process is designed to be totally hands-off – you stick the DVD in the drive and type “upgrade”, and at the end of the theatre day it will convert the main “cms” computer (one per site) and all the “cp” computers (one per projector) from Redhat 7.3 to CentOS 3.4, upgrade from version 3.3 to 3.6 of our software, and magically preserve all your settings and configuration. You should come in the next day to find everything ready for the day’s schedule.
For the very first one at a customer site, though, they sent out a technician to babysit it. Unfortunately they send a techician who’d never done or witnessed one of our many test upgrades in-house.
You probably guessed what happened – she saw the cms come up, didn’t realize that the cps start after the cms is done, and rebooted the cms at the worst possible time – right when all 18 cps were attempting PXE (network) boots and expecting the cms to be there to send them what they needed. And the cms doesn’t start dhcpd by default, so the cps have had nothing to talk to all night. And of course everybody is screaming for me when I got in!
typing with one hand, and not why you think
I went to the doctor about my sore wrist. he sent me to a specialist who told me i’ve torn the sheath on one of the tendons in my wrist and it must be immobilized. so i’m in a cast up to my armpit for the next two weeks, and then a smaller cast with strict orders to keep it pronated for another four weeks. no flying, no kayaking, minimal driving, and typing is very difficult. this fucking sucks.
What a weekend!
Saturday, I woke up to an email saying that my waypoint generator had a bunch of Canadian airports with US-style identifiers (instead of CYRP, Carp was KYRP). I fixed that first. Then Vicki and I replaced the outside front floodlight which had a wonky socket. And we replaced the floodlights over the garage, which supposedly had a light sensor (although it was more of a randomness generator) with one that had a motion detector. Since we can’t find a switch for these lights, I like the idea that they won’t be on all night. This involved hacksawing off a bit of iron pipe conduit that was sticking out too far to put the box where I wanted it and some simple wiring. Or at least it would probably be simple wiring for somebody who isn’t scared of ladders and electricity (gee, my brother used to shock me with electricity and throw me off barn beams – see a connection?). But we got it done – I’m so domestic it hurts.
Sunday, I got up bright and early to be a safety pilot for Paul P. He’s been my safety pilot in the past, so it was only fair, even if it did mean getting up ungodly early. I took some pictures while he was buzzing around, but most of them sucked. Here are a few that didn’t suck too bad.
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Back at the airport, there was an ancient Dornier flying boat re-engined with modern turboprop engines. Cool!
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After that, I went kayaking again. This time I went a little slower, and went up all the way to Blossom Road. The river was still quite shallow, and fast. I lost track of the number of times I had to put down my paddle and push down and forward or backward on the bottom of the river because I was bottomed out. (Try that with a canoe!)
On the way back I took one of the other branches because this canoe full of girls can careering across the river and rammed me without making the slightest effort to slow down or avoid me – after they saw they were on a collision course, they all stopped paddling – and when I got to the fork there was another one of these canoes full of girls sideways in the river. But it worked out well – there was a Great Blue Heron on the bank of the river that I got a couple of shots of, and then some “ducks in a row”, and then a Green Heron, which I ‘ve seen very few of over the years.
The best pictures from today’s paddling.
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Unfortunately on the way home I noticed that I had a really badly sprained wrist. Unfortunately it’s my left one (I’m left handed), but I suppose the right would have been worse since it would be hard to shift my car like that. It was literally a big pain trying to put my kayak away afterwards.
Forgot to mention…
That this iPod came FedEx. And everything that I complained that you used to be able to do with UPS, FedEx does right. The door tag had the address of the local depot, their hours, and the information that you could come by the depot after 5:30pm to pick up the item, or if you didn’t come, they’d re-attempt the delivery the next day, and if I wanted I could sign the door tag in lieu of signing for the package. You could even give them information on a secure place on your premises for them to leave it, if you wanted them to put it behind the door or in your garage or something.
I got the same information when I phoned from work (before I saw the door tag). No muss, no fuss, no bother.