Living a life less ordinary

I sometimes think I should just jack the towel in, develop some major form of drug addiction and spend my days getting the state to pay my rent and smokes money. This can't be right. Work is pratically killing me at the moment. I'm knocking support tickets out of the arena, most on my queue are there because the "client" can't be fscking arsed to reply back that they work and so close them. I am starting to get to the "after three no replies, I'm cancelling the damn ticket" frame of mind. Friday proved how mad it's getting. I worked 3 hours over during which I types a grand total of two lines, one at the start of the three hours to shut shit down and the other at the end to start it all up again... and some minor clicking to make sure that services were running, of course! :)

There seems to be a gremlin circulating the systems as we're having a spate of fatal systems errors, not helped by the hosting company seemingly not being able to provide an adequate satble power supply. I've practically been doing break/fix for the past fornight and it's starting to wear me a little thin. Add to that that one of the DBA numpts wants to set up a "systems monitor" so that they can export the systems info to a database. We already have a systems monitor, why not just develop that one to export SQL?!? I've been pretty good at not going postal this week. The systems monitor is developing a bit of a cult following and a swelling "to do" list.

RRDB has been well-behaved for almost two months, no low-disk alerts, no system drop outs. I did a migration run last week which would normally take about 36 hours start to finsh. This one took a grand total of ten minutes as thewre was nothing to migrate. Apparently we're up at 2PB on storage now, I haven't run the accountancy on the stacks so can't confirm that but it wouldn't surprise me. I'm pegged to get the server/service upgrades done which would be a big tick on my CV and now onw of the managers is talking about progressing the whole technology up a level.I've done no development in about two weeks, not even a small bit of helper-app noodling. This makes me unhappy! :(

I seem to have pulled off a sweet steal. Did a short punt on one of my "favourite" stocks about a month ago, thinking that with the market mainly being on holiday and the 'lympics playing there might be a bit of a ground swell. Well blow me down did I call that one right! Very nice return with most of it locked in should the markets tank. Just a shame I couldn't see the logic of it all and put some more cash into it. Most of the rest of my p/f is doing well, showing blue so I can't complain there. I just need to rebalance the weighting so that the more profitable ones have a good size chunk of the total. OK, they're not earning me "Rockfeller money" but they are earning more than if I'd left the cash mouldering in a bank account somewhere.

Loving the weather, just wished it hadn't rolled in this quick and that it'd freshen the air a bit. There seems to be a lot of moisture around at the moment. Also wished I'd got myself organised/energised as I've missed a birthday party/drink-up.. again!

Just bought a couple of tickets for an event I'm not going to for someone else. People must think I know womething about gigs and clubs and things! :)

Right off mfor one last check that everything's running green. Catch you later.

So.. after more than a week of harvering on about how an external user can't connect via the VPN to one particular system, in spite of there being no evidence of them trying to connect at all, no real tools offered to me to attempt to solve the problem leaving me to rely on just your say-so, showing you there are no user ACLs on that system, no internal firewalls, TCP wrappers spread to the widest of internal allowables you spend the time to write up a detailed date-by-date care bear-level complaint/report of who did what and when and then send that to me and the management.

What a shame that today was also the day that I'd gotten just a bit too whacked off with your endless mithering, and what looked like a fairly obvious attempt by you to enveigle the situation and had taken my laptop in with me, connected it to the net via my IP dongle (making it truely an "outside connection"), had gone in via the SAME VPN and discovered that sure enough you can't connect to that particular system but... you can't connect to any other system in the same damn subnet! Are you sure there's a route through to 192.168.3.x?

While I don't always do it I do try and stick to the words of one Sherlock Holmes: "When you have eliminated all other candidates, then the last remaining candidate must be the culprit, no matter how implausible".

And this is so true in this case. The network dr00g had followed the protocol of diagnosing the problem exactly as it had been reported with no attempt to "think outside the box", diagnose the process chain meaning that there could only be one culprit, which was the system. The culprit had already been determined, it was just a case of proving the guilt. However he had missed the slight detail that there were more possible candidates in the chain and he had just ignored them. He had put blind faith in his setup "to work" so the culprit "must be the system". However, when you can show that every other system in the same subnet is also uncontactable then the finger of blame suddenly turns back on ....the VPN! Quelle surprise!

In a way I am majorly pissed off about this as the guy has been calling my judgement and diagnosis into question for over a week, wasting my time debugging his problem when a very simple thought train of "Can I connect to anywhere else from here? Does this problem show up elsewhere?" would have shown him that the problem was a little closer to his own doorstep than he wanted to admit.

So I just punched that problem right out of the ring.

I'm the first to admit that I'm not really the "grand master" of any particular trade more than a rather commited dabbler in a few. However when you get to the point where you can't even follow the basic 101 techniques of diagnosing problems in your own field and just try and palm them off as MY problem, don't be surprised if I suddenly get uber-L337 geek-god on you and shove the proof that the fault is most likely yours firmly up your hiney!

You don't get to do this sh!t for more than 30 years without learning at least a few basics.

</flame>

Hope you all had a good Christmas. Me? I`m just making my first ever LJ post using a Kindle. Oh yes! I can easily see myself becoming a Kindle geek/hacker in the new year :)

Have fun

I'm getting sloppy trying to keep this up to date. I'm having one of those weeks were things have gotten interesting. As of this Friday I will have been to four gigs in a week, and at three of those I've been working.

( Four gigs, one DJ set, one mini-rant, one cake and a head squirrelCollapse )

Ah yes! LiveJournal, the mistress discarded, disregarded to the chomping teeth of things that need doing. As I've been so remiss in not making an entry lately this is just going to be a brief-ish whizz through of the last however long its been since I last updated.
( A brief history of (my) timeCollapse )

OK, since the last update there was the goths-on-a-boat thing and thank Bob they had a bigger boat. Met up withsaucy_goth and we went to have noodles beforehand. Then back to the meeting point which you couldn't miss for the rather large mope of goffs stood around outside. The boat journey went well with the passing under the Greenwich Meridan out and back again.

Nothing much else in the week after that, work is killing me.

Last night was meet LS again, this time at The Hobdevlin. Got to catch up with a few old faces I haven't seen for a while and then our group trundled off to Inferno, which was quiet for the first hour or so.

Due to work frazzling my greycells, I haven't been up to doing much afterwards lately so I've been catching up on horror movies I seem to have missed. Here's the list of most of them from the last two weeks or so.
( The 12 movie listCollapse )

Over the last few weeks I've been catching up on some movies that I've missed along the way. They're mainly classed as 'horror movies'. Some are well-known, some just turned up on the list. Here's what's been on the screen lately:

Quarantine 2 : Terminal
A medium-sized planeload of passengers leave Los Angeles(?) about the same time as a disease breaks out there that causing people to turn violent. A teacher, who is one of the passengers, is carrying a transporter full of "hamsters" that are the pets of his class. During the flight one passenger turns violent, bites a stewardess and is restrained. The plane makes an emergency landing at 'some' airport only for the passengers to find out that they can't get out of their terminal and when the CDC turn up, they (the CDC) are only to eager to shoot the passengers dead.

An OK film with a reasonably credible story which suffers from being predictable at the points of delivery.

28 Days Later
You've probably seen this already. A rage virus infects the populace of the UK and everyone kills everyone else.
A good film in the post-apocalyptic genre. Christoper Ecclestone plays a rather not very nice army commander who has plans to repopulate the country and eventually ends up as zombie food. The zombies don't attack and eat each other (why not?) so they eventually starve (to death? They're already dead?)

28 Weeks Later
About 6 months after the initial outbreak all the zombies have starved to death (see '28 Days Later') and the Americans have put their army to work at repopulating the UK (no, not in that way!). So a "colony" is set up on Canary Wharf (after a zombie attack we repopulate by putting people in a place that's usually full of zombies?) and all is well. However the main character's wife, who was supposed to have been killed and eaten 6 months back, turns up again so is put into quarantine and ends up infecting the main character. So, another zombie outbreak and the "appropriate" military response is.. kill everybody! A couple of survivors of the military slaughter end up hitching a ride to Paris.. and sure enough, the virus breaks out there.

After.Life
Now this was a weird and really interesting film. Christina Ricci as a stressed young professional living with her boyfried storms out of the restaurant just before her boyfriend proposes marriage to her, jumps into her car and is involved in an accident with a large truck. What happens next is were the story really gets interesting as while her body is left with a mortician you're not quite sure if she is dead or still alive and being conned into thinking she's dead by the mortician who exhibits slight overtones of necrophilia. The ending is pretty unexpected as well and it makes it a worthwhile watch.. and not just for the bits with Christina in the all-together.

Psycho Ward
A group of friends decide to make a documentary-style film in a disused psychiatric prison. So they camp out in its grounds. However the prison still seems to have one inhabitant who styles himself on Jason Vorjes/LeatherFace and he proceeds to kill the members of the group. The acting's wooden as is the dialogue and it's all a bit too predictable.

Legion
God decides he wants to wipe out humainty and instructs his angels to do his bidding. However he is aware of the "second coming" so has to stop that. Enter Archangel Michael to protect the mother of an unborn child who is working in a diner in the middle of nowhere. What follows is a battle against the 'legion' of possessed bodies intent on killing the soon-to-be mother which reaches a climax when the Archangel Gabriel appears, to carry out God's wishes. You'll find out that Archangels can die and they can pass on their powers to others. An OK film.

Session 9
A group of workers are contracted to remove the asbestos from an old asylum with a bonus involved for a quick completion.  While on a break one of the workers finds some audio recordings of psychiatric sessions with one of the (no longer present) patients, Mary Hobbs who suffered from a multple personality disorder and was commited for a gruesome murder.. He regularly listens to the tapes and starts mapping out the various personas mentioned by Mary. Another of the team finds a stash of all the old valuables of the previous residents. What follows is that the members of the group are killed off, one by one and you're left trying to work out who is doing the killings. A reasonably good film if you can keep track of all the bits of backstory that get dropped in.

Darkbreed
Six astronauts bail out of a mission and return to earth. Unfortunately they're infected with an alien lifeforce which is aiming to invade earth. It lifts a lot from Alien/Aliens and even though it was made mid-90s it looks like a late-70s/early-80s movie. A B-Movie for a rainy Wednesday maybe.

Case 39
Renee Zellweigger plays a social case worker looking after families with children who are having problems. When she visits the family of Case 39, she is met with an atmosphere of antagonism and agression from the parents to their child, a young girl. Renee's character notices heavy locks on the parent's bedroom door and feels sympathy for the daughter. So she leaves her phone number with the daughter telling her to ring if she ever feels she's in danger. The phone call comes and Renee dashes around to the house to find the parents have stuck the daughter in the oven and turned up the gas. The daughter ends up being 'fostered' by Renee's character at which point bad things start to happen to her friends. This is a good story which, while it telegraphs a lot of the storyline, is genuinely creepy. Unfortunately the ending seems rushed and just tacked on the end.

Dead & Buried
A town sheriff tries to work out why people are disappearing or ending up dead in his town. His main line of enquiry is the town's mortician. Various people die in fairly gruesome ways and all of them end up being prepared by the mortician. The story evolves to being about how the mortician is not really there to preserve the image of the dead& and memory after the fact more than he's there to stop them from ever having to worry about death again. An odd, stumbling, at time confusing Wednesday afternoon B-Movie.

Cloverfield
One word - boring. Third-person camcorder/documentary style with too much screaming and panic. Would you really keep a camcorder recording what was happening while trying to run for cover to avoid getting yourself killed? If you really want to see an entertaining monster-attacks-city movie watch the original Godzilla movies. At least they don't have as much forced panicky screaming.

I seem to be getting really out of this trying to keep this 'ere journal upto date thing. In my defence I will say that I have been a ton load of busy. So what's been happening? Here's the highlights.

( The week and a bit in briefCollapse )