Year: 2017

A few days ago I ordered some power cords for my servers. Today they arrived, neatly packed in a box, along with a small bag of M&M’s.

Brilliant! It probably cost the guy less than fifty cents, and it made me extra happy. When I need more power cords, you’d better believe I’ll head his way so I can get more candy.

This was a conversation I had with Kyra yesterday.

I talked to Kyra for a bit today as I was navigating Denver traffic on I-25. She told me that it’s official: she’s decided to serve a mission for the church. Although it’s strongly encouraged for young men, missions are optional for young women. So this isn’t something she has to do, but rather that she wants to do.

She’ll start filling out paperwork in the next few weeks, and will be eligible to leave for the 18-month stint sometime after her 19th birthday in July. It’ll be interesting to see if she leaves before Alex comes home from his mission (sometime in October)… that would mean the two of them don’t see each other for three and a half years!

I’m really proud of her for deciding to do this. It’s going to be amazing.

Today I was playing ultimate at lunchtime, and I managed to score a callahan. BAM. That’s the first time I’ve done it– despite playing for almost 27 years– and definitely something I’ve wanted to cross off my bucket list.

(A callahan is when the opposing team is on offense, deep in your territory, and makes a pass that a defensive player– in this case, me– intercepts in the end zone for a score. It’s very rare. And also very awesome.)

Well, I can finally check “taxes” off my to-do list for the year. They actually went more smoothly than in years past, maybe because Laralee and I have been tracking our expenses in a better way. I ended up filing some extra paperwork to correct a tax mistake I made in 2014 (sigh) but I think everything is squared away and now I can sit back and wait for my refund…

Oops.

I’m doing some server work, and I accidentally reconfigured one of the servers to use Spanish. I set up the locale just as you’d expect:

As anyone can see, there’s a typo in that command. “es” is the language code for Spanish… I meant “en” for English. It took me a few minutes to figure out why suddenly all of the text from commands was being shown in Spanish…

Back in the Day (as in, before the internet), you could spout whatever “facts” you wanted, and people couldn’t prove you wrong without going to the library and checking out a book.

I’ve been trying to break Zaque of two bad habits for the past couple of months. One is that he takes off his shoes when coming in the front door after school, and just leaves them there until the next morning. The other is that when he’s working at his little computer desk, he often has snacks and leaves glasses, plates, and crumbs on Laralee’s desk (right beside him). In both cases, I’ve been nagging him but it hasn’t worked.

A few days ago I struck on an idea. I would charge him one cent for the first infraction, and then the price would double every time he forgot to put away his shoes or clean up his snack. On day one, he failed on both accounts, so he owed me $0.03. I mentioned to him that the power of doubling is amazing: after a month of not putting away his shoes, he would owe me a little over ten dollars.

Since then, he’s taken care of it every day. Apparently three cents was all it took to break him of his habits…

So today I had planned to spend the morning installing some new hardware at BitRelay: a server, a switch, and a backup disk array. It was all pretty innocuous, and I figured I’d be home a little after lunchtime to hang out with Laralee and Zaque and enjoy the Presidents’ Day holiday.

Well, I forgot to bring the disk array with me, which meant I had to make another trip and basically spend three hours in the car (it’s a 45-minute drive each way to the datacenter).

And when I installed the new switch, for reasons unknown to me, my entire network stack went down. That meant all of the servers were running but couldn’t be reached from the internet, so for about 15 minutes a whole bunch of clients were calling and emailing me and my team asking why their web sites were down. Meanwhile, I was frantically plugging and unplugging things, hoping that I could fix whatever had happened and get everything running again. In the end, I really don’t know what happened because rebooting the network stack twice seemed to resolve it. Ugh.

By the time I was finished it was evening, and then I had to write an explanation (and apology) to my clients so they understood what had happened and how I’d keep it from happening again. That’s never a good conversation to have.

In a little ray of sunshine, one of my clients responded with this:

Nice. That helped to remind me that despite my feeling that it had been a disaster of epic proportions, in the grand scheme of things, 15 minutes of downtime isn’t really all that big a deal.

I was looking through some photos and found this one of my beautiful girl.

I know she’s having a blast in college, but there are days when I miss her…