FQ1: Which entry in your blog is your favorite so far and why is that?
Don't think I really have a favourite. One that I probably put the most effort into was Creative Cockroach Control

FQ2: Which entry in your blog has gotten you the most attention and why do you think that is?
Definitely my Aqua One AR-620T Support Forum. It wasn't originally called that, but people kept coming to it after a couple of people posted looking for information on this particular fish tank, and it snowballed from there. It's the only forum on the web dedicated to discussion of this particular aquarium model.

FQ3: Which entry in your blog do you feel was overlooked and why should people have read it?
I am still astounded that anyone reads about my boring little life at all, although I did drop a not so subtle hint one time that wasn't responded to :)

FQ Reveal: Which entry in your blog do you think is most indicative of who you are and what makes it so?
Dunno. I have censored the worst of my rants and self wallowing. One of my worst rants on how people easily piss me off is Completely Pissed Off

Nonsensical answers for the most part. Better late than never.

FQ1: Name one thing you are thankful for that is kind of a silly thing to be thankful about.
Fairy lights
FQ2: Name two things other people seem to be thankful for which you are not.
Blue vein cheese, chili
FQ3: Name three things that don't currently exist which you would be thankful for if they did.
Teleporters, thought operated appliances/remote controls, MacGyver on dvd
FQ UNTHANKFUL: Forget about thanking others, what's something everybody else should be thankful to YOU for?
Not much

I need to learn temperance. I need to control myself when people piss me off.

There's this woman at work who chronically doesn't log support calls when she needs help (of which she needs a lot), and will grab us whenever we walk by to ask questions (which happens a lot since we need to go into her office to collect our mail :/ ). Today she came into our office because she couldn't remember her password (even though she uses it multiple times per day) - more likely something weird had happened. But even when we reset it for her it still wouldn't work, so she came back again five minutes later to bug us again. Of course this time I had to go and have a look at her computer, then reset the password again. The thing is, I'm not even meant to be doing support calls, and was in the middle of trying to make something in my database work, and the constant interruptions were already bugging me. But having to get up and go do someone else's job *when she hadn't even logged a call for it* made me lose it, and I grumbled very loudly to her all the way down the corridor that she *has* to log calls, and this is exactly why.

Must learn self control. Must be patient. Must help the lusers, er, users because they don't know any better.

Got a very cool toy today. Not sure if I want to reveal to the world what it is yet. I may create a subblog about it, as several other people seem to have done.

Work just about broke me today. Lotus notes broke me first. Gave up in disgust mid morning, after a mammoth struggle with me trying to make it do things it's just not really good at. Then had a look at setting up a new server, except it only has two onboard SATA slots, and we want to install three SATA disks. Back to the sales department to order more bits. Finally made some progress with notes in the afternoon, may even have a working database soon.

Then spent the evening packing lollies, icing, gingerbread, pins, plastic knives, moist towlettes etc for the upcoming Gingerbread House night at church. Fun fun fun!

Stolen from Richard, source of many a meme

1. What is your favourite colour? Some sort of aqua
2. Tell me about a talent or skill you possess, which I've not yet witnessed or discovered. Who's I? :) Many blog readers will not know of my only talent, which is giving massages. Kirk does though :)
3. What was your favourite subject in school? Science
4. What is one place to which you've never been, but you'd like to visit, someday? (Locally or abroad) Europe
5. Are you a morning person or a night person? Morning
6. Are you left-handed or right-handed? Right handed
7. Did astronauts really land on the moon, or was it all a hoax? Shrug. Well if they didn't land there then the Russians would have had to have been in on it, as their rock samples matched up. And during the cold war that would have been fairly unlikely.
8. What's in your pocket? (Or if there's nothing in your pocket at present, what sorts of things are most often in your pockets?) A $50 note and a hair elastic. Only thing not emptied out the moment I get home, because there's no bulk to it and it doesn't bother me being there.
9. In 10 years, you see yourself... (Finish that any way you desire.) Doing much the same thing, but hopefully somewhat more travelled
10. There's a power outage, and you don't have a generator. This means no electronics--no computer, no telly, no videos, no stereo and no electric heat or electric kettle--what do you do to keep warm, content and entertained? Keeping warm isn't a problem in Sydney, I'd just put a jumper on. But content and entertained, that's tough. During the day would be ok, cause there'd be enough light. But at night I'd be utterly lost. Like the time a few months ago when there actually was a blackout at night and I had literally *nothing* to do.
11. What's one thing you cannot bring yourself to eat? Wasabi.

    Just got home from the Dean's final end-of-year bash. All went swimmingly. The eggnog was delicious, if not as potent as claimed (five glasses later and barely any effect). Many incrimating videos of people singing were recorded mwoohahahahah.

FQ1: Who is your one favorite author and why is their work so appealing to you?
Roald Dahl. Not really sure why. Just kinda silly in a lot of ways, and his grownups stories are kinda spooky too.

FQ2: What are your two favorite literary subjects and why is reading about them interesting to you?
I like reading about science stuff. Science fiction is pretty good too.

FQ3: What are your three favorite books and why are each of them special to you?

1. Star Trek VI by J.M. Dillard - only book I ever read at least three times before the Harry Potter books. I like the character development and how I can picture the movie so well from it.
   
2. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban by J.K. Rowling - my favourite of the Harry Potter books, and funnily enough the only one where the bad guy isn't specifically out to get Harry.
   
3. Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton - quite a bit better than the movie, it held me fascinated for the day and a half I sat down to read it, the moment I finished my mid-year exams in second year uni. It still has some of the fundamental flaws of the movie (like who'd leave a game park with three people manning it for an entire weekend??), but the book and the chain of events that surrounded it were fundamental to the very existence of this website, my job, my friends, this house, pretty much everything about my life at the moment is the way it is because of that book.
   

FQ Author: If you had to write a book, what genre of book would you pen (mystery, romance, science fiction, biography, etc.) and what would it be about?
Probably a science fiction story. Although the only book I've ever written (a project for Year 8 english) was mostly an adventure with a teenager and a couple of kids shipwrecked on a Pacific Island with bird smugglers.

Seems somehow appropriate that the topic be Historical, since the topic is now historical, to the tune of two weeks...! (has it been that long, yikes!)

FQ1: If you were able to visit any time period in the past, when would it be? What is it about this particular point in history that appeals to you?
It might be cool to visit Biblical times. I also always thought it'd be cool to travel the world before tourism really took off and cluttered everything up. Seeing Europe before the wars and acid rain would have been great.

FQ2: If you could meet any person from throughout history, who would that be? What makes them so special to you?
Jesus. He's my saviour.

FQ3: If you could reach through time and grab a piece of historical memorabilia, what artifact would you take and what would you do with it?
Gosh I dunno. Never thought about that one.

FQ QUANTUM LEAP: You have been given a one-time-only opportunity to travel back in time and interfere with history! Would you do it? Where would you go and what would you try to change?
I used to think about going back in time in my own life, like going back to primary school, and just laughing at Kerry Williams who was such a bitch to me, but then I thought what would I do with all my spare time without my computer and the internet. Sometimes I thought about going back to earlier points at school or uni or even work, but then I'd be wondering what I'd have to do in the same order to get to where I am now. Like I'd want to work where I am now, but to get there I'd need the history I had. But then I'd be frustrated having to do the desktop support which was necessary to be where I am now. I'd certainly avoid working at OzEmail, but then without that experience I may not have gotten to work at CIA. There's just too many dependencies to get right.. :) hrm don't think this is making much sense :) Going to back to being a student at uni would be a disaster though - especially if I was dropped mid session, I'd fail! lol

I also used to wonder if I could go back and stop certain disasters. The Challenger disaster was one I thought about years ago. But noone would believe a girl from Australia predicting something on the other side of the world. Until it happened of course. Even with recent things, I'd be hard pressed to convince anyone, given that I don't pay too much attention to news, and wouldn't be able to tell when certain things actually happened. hrm I'm still rambling.

But in answer to the question. If the opportunity was given to me I'd give it a go. Trying to prevent the World Trade Centre disaster might be a logical choice, because I'd know enough about the specifics of it to make some attempt at convincing people it was going to happen.

Firstly a welcome to all my lurkers. I asked for one response, and got two, go figure! :) It's nice to know my insignificant rantings keep other people entertained at work :):)

Top things that piss me off #7:
People that honk you when you stop at a sign that says "Left turn on red permitted after STOPPING". By law you're supposed to wait something like three seconds after stopping, or at the very least until you can see around the truck that's blocking sight of the oncoming traffic. But nooooooo some twats want to beep you the second you stop. Next time someone does that I think I might just stop there until the light turns green, just to teach them a lesson in patience.

I watched Behind Enemy Lines tonight. I really liked the cinematography and camera work. The scene at the beginning where the F-18 gets shot down is fantastic, and the scenery throughout the rest of the film is bleak but beautiful. The story itself is a bit lame, and it gets a scathing review on IMDB for not being accurate about the Balkan war. But have definitely seen worse.

Have mostly cleaned up the mess on the file server. Still going to have to clean up the corrupt files, either by another chkdsk, or wiping the partition and starting again. Then we have to figure out the raid problems. I'm fairly certain it was the ultra 320 interface. So far no incidents now that we've gone back to the ultra 160 card. Not to mention the backups are now running at a full gig/minute, as opposed to ~650mb/minute with the 320 card. I think we should send Dell an invoice for total lost productivity. My boss had to face a "please explain" from the powers that be. It wasn't too bad, they just wanted to know what went wrong and what we were doing to make sure it didn't happen again. I felt really bad for him though.

But just to keep my disasters in perspective.

Disaster 1. Australia's weather. We've been in drought all year, and today there was so much rain that whole towns have been completely flooded.

Disaster 2. An Aeroperu flight crashed in 1996 because a maintenance worker taped up the static ports while cleaning the plane and forgot to remove the tape. The ports are used to monitor flight speed and altitude, and the pilots were getting all sorts of errors, and eventually crashed into the sea because they didn't know how high they were. 70 people died. This was the second episode of Air Crash Investigations I've seen - fascinating show. Last week they had an airbus that ran out of fuel due to a fuel leak, and glided 100 miles over the middle of the Atlantic Ocean and landed safely in the Azores. Freaky stuff!

I think I had just about the worst day of my career today. On Saturday morning during the first of the raid container rebuilds the file system on the file server decided to get corrupted. But of course with very few people accessing the server we didn't know about it until this morning, when one group of users couldn't get to their directory at all. After we checked the event logs and saw what was happening we thought we should do an emergency shutdown and chkdsk so that the affected users might be able to do some work that day. However the server decided it wanted to reset the permissions on every file on the server. All one million of them. After two and a half hours and 150000 files we decided we'd risk losing everything and reboot out of it. The server came back up, but all the file permissions were utterly screwed.

So while everything was so fubar, we decided to go back to the ultra 160 emm card and cable, because we knew that they at least worked. Plus dropping back to 160 from 320 we may eliminate some of the flakyness in the raid containers.

So after replacing the card and rebooting, it was then a matter of resetting all the permissions. Fortunately I'd only recently done a bunch of permissions scripts and consolodation of our documentation, so it wasn't such a difficult thing to reset all the permissions on the box to what they should be. But it did take many hours.

I still have a few major directories to go, and then I have to figure out which files were corrupted and try and restore those from last week's backup tapes.

The irony of all of this is, the backup tonight is running faster than it's ever run before on the new server. And this is on a "slower" emm card. Which may tend to suggest a problem with the 320 emm card or the new cable. Who knows. Dell certainly don't. Before all of this started I talked to them this morning, and they were going to escalate it to their second level support. Well they called back this afternoon and I kinda let them have it somewhat. Well not badly, I just told them what I'd gone through all day and that we'd gone back to the old card. He offered to send out a tech and I said well that would be somewhat difficult on a production server to "fiddle". I want to get the machine settled a bit more, and have some sort of way to recover to another machine if necessary. This of course involves buying another server, and replication software that I haven't had time to research yet :/ Blah.

Urgh. What a horrible day. It's the biggest unplanned outage I've ever had at work. Very distressing.

I was going to go to bed, but I have this urge to watch the backup finish, so watching Peter Pan to recover my mood somewhat.