A contender!

This day was a contender for one of the most stress filled days in a long while, starting in the morning when I needed to go visit Stuie's house, about an hour away.

I checked my servers. They're running fine. Armed with cell phone (for SMS messages just in case), Tzirel and I set out. About 10 minutes away from the bus station, a phone call comes in to my cell phone... sneezy is down.

Usual checks, yep, it's really down. :-(. Not again... well, I'll check in to the Internet Cafe in the station in a couple of minutes. I bought an hour's worth of time, and they had a promotion available for a free 30 minutes (today only). I used that. Got the DC to reboot.

Client says "it's up, thanks... but BTW, you should know that client B spoke to me and he's REALLY unhappy". He's right to be, too. I called, tried some damage control. In the short term he'll let me deal with it, but not sure about middle term or long term anymore. What really bugs me is ... not only is he right, but this damages my reputation. Also, in the back of my head I am thinking that Client A is also starting to have doubts.

With THAT on my head we went to Stuie's apartment. Nice place. Took pics, measurements. Field tested the bathrooms. Stuck around for about an hour, back to bus station (missed the 1:00 PM bus by 5 minutes) and spent some more time at the internet cafe (great cappuccino) checking sneezy again.

Back home, deal with most urgent emails, off to a funeral.

More urgent stuff, and of course now I have to plan a migration from sneezy to dopey.

Then, my VoIP DTA broke. Still working on that, but I think it's a hardware failure.

Some days it doesn't pay to get out of bed.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Excerpts from the outbox: Part I

A new feature on my blog: Excerpts from my emails. This one comes from something I sent my boss today: Oh, and one more thing: The pepper in our kitchen is basically ground pepper. In chunks. If you ever try to sprinkle it on something cold (i.e. that you’'re not cooking), in order to taste the pepper you have to bite into a chunk of pepper, which isn’t a pleasant experience. A better solution (or perhaps an additional solution) would be to get pepper in powdered form. This allows sprinkling of the condiment onto cold foods and having the flavor imbued into the food without necessitating masticating a large chunk of pepper. There. Now you know I take my work seriously. Hmm, maybe I'll start another blog and call it Excerpts from the Outbox . Hey, it's a thought.
Read more

Hot and Sour Soup

Image
  Hot and Sour Soup – 8 Servings (with baby corn instead of bamboo shoots, 'cos I couldn't find bamboo shoots) Note: You might want to taste as you go. This is kinda hot, and kinda sour. If this is a problem, you shouldn't be making this soup, but consider easing off on the vinegar and on the white pepper and chili flakes if you like it but need less heat. I didn't sauté the mushrooms long enough when I did this. Maybe taste one when you think it's ready. Maybe cut the baby corn in half so it'll fit on a spoon. Widthwise too, of course, you want it thin.  On to the recipe! Ingredients Dried shiitake mushrooms – 1 ½ oz (43 g) Soy sauce – 5 Tbsp (75 ml) Seasoned rice vinegar – ⅔ cup (160 ml) Ground white pepper – 1 Tbsp (8 g) Sesame oil – ¾ tsp (3.5 ml) Cornstarch – 6 Tbsp (48 g) Water (for slurry) – 6 Tbsp (90 ml) Vegetable oil – 4 tsp (20 ml) Chili flakes – 1 tsp (mild) to 2 tsp (hot) Minced fresh ginger root – 2 ½ tsp (5 g) Sliced green onions – ½ cu...
Read more

School at last - and more toys coming

The kids are going back to school after a long summer. Early on there was some camp, but later on things dragged a bit. I guess Leah's blog will have more about that. But she's back at the dorm (and we miss her) now. Batya (does she still spell it with an "h"?) came and went off to school. Dani came and went off to school. And Ari is here as well. Yechiel will be coming back next week, and hopefully he'll have a Linksys signal booster and a USB 802.11b adaptor for me. It's for the new computer in the mamad (i.e. "protected" room). Oh, didn't I mention that? On one of my trips overseas, the laptop in the mamad went bad. The screen flickered badly. Later I borrowed a large (beautiful) Dell LCD monitor from the office and attached it to the laptop. It worked, but the positioning of the keyboard was problematic, because we didn't have a keyboard in the house that would fit the laptop, which only has USB ports. Later at some point ...
Read more