Watching the finale of the Commonwealth Games Closing Ceremony. The event that is going to cause a week of anguish to hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of people in four states. Was it worth it? Ask everyone affected at the end of this week. James suggested it would have been better to delay the change by one day, not one week. Then only Sunday appointments would have been affected.

*sigh*

Got the petunias pruned, and another four hours of Looney Tunes cartoons recorded to dvd. And watched the directors commentary of A Bug's Life....

HAHAHAHAHHAAHAHAHAH John Farnham forgot the words to You're The Voice!!!! HAHAHHAHAHAAH /me ROTFLMAO

... but didn't get the vacuuming done.. oh well ..
oh and cooked up lots of chicken wings. And then spent 40 minutes scraping all the marinade and goop off the baking dishes.

Oh that John Farnham goof cracks me up. I don't know that I've ever ranted about him on this blog. I really like his music, but he comes across as a Melbourne Snob, and charges international-act prices to his Australian concerts. I wanted to see him in ~91 and then again recently, but both times they cost what and international act would, and I thought "well stuff him".

Well I'm off to bed to talk to my boy.. nite!

Well Saturday. The array finished rebuilding around 5pm. Spent a little while preparing for the failback. Nervous moment as after a remote reboot the machine didn't come back - turned out the network interface just didn't come up - a common problem on 2650s. Met up with Jim and we began the failback and restore procedures. Files finished copying back in the middle of the night on Sunday. So Sunday morning checked all the files and reenabled the server service. And that was the end of that little drama.

Then this morning I got paged because the server room temperature was rising. I was running in slow motion after quite a lot of wine last night (dinner at Alan and Marylon's, needed to unwind of the stress of the weekend), but eventually dragged myself into work. Dead aircon. Yay. Opened up the server room door and mounted a couple of fans in the doorway. Waited for people to turn up to come and fix. Turned out other circuits were dead too. The sparkies switched back on the other circuits but wouldn't touch the aircon circuit. So had to wait for the aircon contractors to turn up. They flicked the aircon curcuit back on but it died a minute or so later, taking the other circuits with them. Yay. So they left it off, brought up a portable aircon, and decided there was a faulty compressor, which will take a few days minimum to have replaced.

So I was a zombie for most of today. Went home early and had a bit of a sleep, only interrupted by occasional calls from telemarketers etc.

No more disasters allowed for at least another week. It's the rules.

On the way up to Armidale I stopped at Flaming Mountain (?) rest area to look at the stars. Plopped the camera on the bonnet of the car and took a couple of pics. At 30 seconds, the streak marks of the stars are visible. This is 10 seconds. Still a bit of movement, although unfortunately it didn't quite focus right either.

The constellation should be familiar, if upside down for you people on the other side of the world :)

Thoroughly lacking inspiration at work at the moment. Lacking direction and feeling a bit squished. My todo list is full of crap. I want something new and exciting to do.

And then I get home and the todo list is also long and boring.

Although I did manage to make a quick and dirty index of the wedding photos.

There's more to the winter olympics than the moguls and downhill skiing. Although you'd never know it (at least from the limited times I've watched it).

Other than that my day was pretty sucky. Sami has decided not to move, so I'm going to be squished between people forever more (or at least until we get a new building or I end up in Canberra or somewhere silly). J wasn't in either so I felt somewhat lost most of the day and really didn't get anything done. Did get to see Jodi's wedding photos which was cool. And all my babies are doing ok, although mama guppy upstairs is still looking quite lethargic :( Will bring my tank downstairs tomorrow. Remind me to get something for Merideth for taking care of them for me for a couple of months.

ok so maybe not exactly. But a brief summary of the rest of the trip (Stu is included in all activities as a given, except the food shopping on Sunday :) ):

Sunday: lazed around, went food shopping, went for a walk, had lamb roast for dinner
Monday: wandered into Canberra, had lunch with Mishi and Damien, went suburb scouting, went for a swim in the Murrumbidgee River, had trout for dinner that Scotty caught
Tuesday: went on a fish shop crawl with Scott, had a rest, went to me little brother's wedding
Wednesday: entertained Lily for a couple of hours, did a car swap, drove home, dinner at J&G's, put my boy on a plane

And to keep me amused while I wait to make sure Stu gets home ok, I'm uploading pics of the wedding. Sorry I'm crap at culling, and I haven't gotten around to making an index page yet.. :)

As is recent tradition, it being the first of the month, people didn't show up for dinner. In fact none of the offspring or spouses were there, only two of the (little) kids (although not so little - Thomas turned 9 yesterday - truly frightening), and Brad. Which actually was kinda cool, cause Brad works with aeroplanes and always talks about cool stuff.

Last night I trekked out to visit the little brother and my soon-to-be sister in law. We watched a couple of episodes of Knight Rider - it really was a terrible show! Then the South Park movie, which was just plain silly (but then I've never watched any South Park), then the Stepford Wives, which was ok.

In between I shopped, tidied, and sorted lego.

Tagged by CC, also seen on Blogography (and probably elsewhere that I haven't caught up with yet :) )

Four jobs you've had in your life:

1. packer of pies at Loftus Pies
   
2. answerer of phones at ozemail
   
3. answerer of phones at cia
   
4. babysitter of servers at uni
   

Four movies you could watch over and over again (not to be confused with favourite movies):

1. Peter Pan
   
2. The Princess Bride
   
3. The Hunt for Red October
   
4. The Sound of Music
   

Four TV shows you love(d) to watch (among many others):

1. MacGyver
   
2. Airwolf
   
3. The Mole
   
4. The Amazing Race
   

Four places you've lived:

1. here
   
2. marrickville
   
3. my parents
   
4. nowhere else really
   

Four places you've been on vacation to:

1. USA (x3)
   
2. Canada
   
3. Lots of Australia in lots of holidays
   
4. New Zealand (when I was 18 months old)
   

Four places you would rather be (or where you'll like to visit?):

1. Austria/Switzerland
   
2. The rest of Europe
   
3. East half of USA
   
4. Lord Howe Island
   

Four of your favourite foods:

1. roast pork
   
2. peppermint chocolate
   
3. potato crisps
   
4. roast chicken
   

Four websites you visit daily:

1. tv guide
   
2. weather pixie (via active desktop and my pixie page)
   
3. kazza.cia.com.au (as my default page on my browser)
   
4. google
   

Four tagged:
I don't tag people. It's a policy. :)

So got to work today and found a couple of puddles of brown liquid. Bad. Very bad. I looked up and there's waste pipes from the labs that run over my head, apparently one of which had leaked all over my desk. Not good. Called the facilities people, who sent two people up over the course of the morning, yet still noone has told me what the brown goopy stuff was or whether I'm going to die from touching it. Grunties.

Bookcrossing meetup in town. Didn't pick up any books! woohoo! heh

Have D&Y staying the night, so I'm back to my single bed for the night heh :)

So after not getting to sleep for ages last night I got woken up at 1:30 by a whole stack of pages in a row. Most of my servers were down. At first I thought something had freaked out the UPSes and they'd all shut down in error. But I looked more closely at the logs of the servers that I *could* reach. Sure enough "UPS on battery" on the ones connected with smart signalling cables. So power had gone out in just one section of the building. Checked with Jim what we should do. Decided to just go in early in the morning to turn everything back on. Watched as the upses drained themselves and turned the servers off, then went back to bed.

Woke up at 5:15. Looked at the two machines that aren't connected by serial cables to upses. They were still up. I assumed that the power had been restored before their ups died, so I got ready and went into work.

Total blackness. Everything was still dead. Even the machines that I'd checked before I left - their ups lasted over four hours!!

Sigh.

So called security who got onto the contractors who eventually came out. Watched them as they flicked some very big switches - so big they needed to use a metal bar wedged in them to turn them. Very cool. Seems that some big device in the building took out the earth leakage circuit for the whole section of the building. Yay. So power was out for most of the night. Hope people's freezers didn't warm up too much. Kicking myself I didn't call security at 1:30. But I blame only two hours sleep and not thinking straight on that one.

But the coolest thing is, all of the servers I connected up with their serial cables on Friday shut themselves down nicely. Still a couple of little issues to work out, but it was a good real-life test of the shutdown system.

I'm *very* sleepie now.