Jared’s Blog

Last weekend I agreed to take care of the Hadash’s pooches while they were out of town for a wedding. As I’ve said before, it’s always a good time.

The husky, Mishka stirs up trouble once in awhile. There was the surround system she destroyed by chewing through the power cable. Luckily, it wasn’t set up yet and thus, was unplugged. Then there was the time she swallowed a large rock, somehow passed it into her intestines, and then cost her owners $2000 to remove.  Sure enough, she couldn’t go three days with me there without some incident.

It was the last of three days that I was there. At 7AM, Mishka comes prancing into the room and starts howling and licking my face. This means she’s bored after being awake for probably over an hour and wants to go outside to play/release internal waste. I stupidly rolled over and fell asleep for another hour. I awoke at 8AM to both dogs wagging their tails (and the husky holwing of course). I walk into the kitchen (which is where the door to the backyard is) and find, all over the floor, pieces of my former toothbrush and my tube of toothpaste. I carelessly had left both sitting in a half-zipped pocket of my duffel bag. Silly me.

So, a trip to Target and $6 later, I now have a new toothbrush and a full tube of toothpaste. All is well.

Let’s play a game. It’s called “What’s under the sheet?” It looks human. It’s been sitting in that exact position for at least 3 hours. Whatever it is under the sheet, it’s wearing shoes because I could see them from the back when I got close. Unfortunately none of us in the office were brave enough to see what was under the sheet.

Being the good Mac fanboy, I was anxiously awaiting Apple’s announcement today. With a title like “The beat goes on,” you knew it was going to be new iPods. Having just taken it all in, I have some reactions.

Well the word is out and so are the new iPods. New colors for Shuffles. Blah. New “fatty” nano. Don’t care. New iPod “Classic.” Interesting, nice price point. iPod Touch. I was hanging on every word until they got to the size, 8GB and 16GB. Wifi enabled. Sweet! Wifi iTunes Store. Also sweet! Starbucks partnership. *silence*

I was all ready to go to the Apple Store after work to buy me a new iPod Touch until I found out they were only going up to 16GB. I can’t live with 16GB. I’m the kind of person who likes to be able to hear a song on a whim. The only way to do that is to carry my whole collection around with me. I reached the point where I could no longer fit all my music on my 60GB iPod not long ago. I deal with it by only putting the stuff I listen to somewhat often on it. That reduced collection is somewhere between 25-30GB. Why couldn’t you have made a 32GB version, Apple? Charge me $499 for it. Everything else about it is sweet, but if you have a device that’s supposed to hold my music, video, and photos, it’s going to need to be larger than 16GB.

Yesterday, I came in to work just like any other day. While checking some bugs out, I went to load the staging version of our site. Lo and behold, the site was down. No big deal, I thought, maybe Apache died and needs to be restarted. I’d been messing with the Apache configs quite heavily last week, and so I just assumed that was what caused the problem.

I brought up my console and typed in the ssh command to which there was no response. The server is located in my building, so I walked over to see what the deal was. The server was still running, so I gave it a restart. Though Linux is known for being rock solid, you’d be amazed at the problems a restart will solve. Well, it finished restarting and still no connection.

After poking around some more, I discovered the server wasn’t even online. I couldn’t ping out. I tried disabling the firewall for awhile, no luck. I tried changing the DNS to OpenDNS, still nothing. Finally, I walked over to the IT admin’s office and asked him if there had been any changes over the weekend. Of course his reply was a “Yes…”

It seems that over the weekend, they decided to switch the IP block they had. And it wasn’t like a subnet changed, the entire block was different. A change like this doesn’t just happen. There needs to be planning done so that server configurations can be changed, DNS needs time to propagate, people need to be notified. Apparently, I wasn’t on that “to notify” list. I was told “we tried to find you on Friday, but we couldn’t.” Bullshit. I was in the office all day on Friday and the IT admin even came in to our office earlier in the day.

I spent the first half of my day yesterday dealing with getting our staging server up and running. All that really needed to be done was to change a few config files. A task I could’ve easily prepared for last weekend and finished in minutes yesterday had I known in advance. That kind of inconsiderate behavior is unprofessional and it really pissed me off.