shaver

OK, Deb, you win. I should be doing something else, but until the Dayquil kicks in I’m not likely to be able to do so.

The Rules

• Link to your original tagger(s) and list these rules in your post. (see above)
• Share seven facts about yourself in the post. (see below)
• Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs. (see below)
• Let them know they’ve been tagged. (you’ll just have to trust me)

The Seven Things

1. I, too, figure skated when I was younger, to mild success. I don’t believe there are pictures of it on the web, which is OK.
2. I once wrote a multi-user email system on top of DOS batch files, without the use of a text editor (copy con: represent).
3. In high school, I was an avid member of the school’s technical theatre (and assembly, and school dance, and gaffer-ball varsity) club — avid to the point that I only narrowly managed to actually graduate from high school.
4. I married my high-school sweetheart.
5. I do not like to eat coconut- or banana-flavoured things, with a few exceptions like coconut milk in curries because what sort of animal do you think I am anyway? For the past 18 months or so, though, I have been trying to train myself to tolerate, if not enjoy, suchly-flavoured things so that I don’t unwittingly pass my aversion on to Claire. (See also: snakes, though not in a culinary sense.)
6. I didn’t get my driver’s license until I was 29.
7. I have lived at 21 addresses in 10 cities.

7 people, all of whom I believe share my disdain for such things to some degree

• Vlad, for taking care of me in Serbia.
• Mom, for taking care of me.
• Phil, for never disguising his contempt for the stupid.
• Hoye, ibid.
• Dave, for teaching me to teach.
• Kev, for being the photographer, bbqer and responsible adult I’d like to be some day.
• George, for being George.

Hard to believe that it was a whole year ago (only a year ago) that we met Claire for the first time. It has been an incredible, wonderful, galactically amazing adventure learning to be her daddy; I can’t wait to see what’s next.

(I’m about 6 months behind on posting pictures; I’ll try to be quicker about the ones from her birthday drop-in this Saturday, ahem.)

Yesterday, the provider that hosts one of my personal machines fell off the network for about 12 hours, and topped it with a power outage from which my machine didn’t come back up on its own. (Never heard why, hardware was fine when it did come up; suspect some mismanagement in the colo space.) The network that came back after the outage was materially slower than before, making it increasingly hard to actually migrate the remaining services off of that machine, onto the new one, which now had replacement fans.

I left, as you might imagine, quite a few voice mails on the tech support box, mails to the support@ address, and even a voice mail on the cell phone of the president of the hosting provider (he had insisted previously that I should call him if there were ever a problem). When I finally heard back from someone at the hosting provider, I was told that I could move my machine to their cabinet at 151 Front for improved reliability. They were doing this for me as a favour!

“No, that’s fine, I’ll take care of it.” Well, actually…they were doing this to reduce the load on the now-weaker uplink from the colo space.

“I won’t be running out of there for long, and I can keep the bandwidth down just fine for a few days, but thanks.” Well, actually…they were doing this because they were shutting that colo space down because their remaining colo customers didn’t need all that space.

“Cool, I’ll be done in a week or so and then I can remove the box entirely, don’t worry about it.” Well, actually…they need to be out of that space in 48 hours or they’ll have to pay rent, or something. I was unable to avoid mentioning that I’d been told I would need to give 60 days notice to cancel my own hosting, a few weeks earlier; I was weak in that regard.

So a wonderful friend of mine moved the old machine to some rack space he has, and then he and other wonderful friends worked all night to get the routing unscrewed. In the process, one of my new machines had to be rebooted, and my friends’ respect for my sleep trumped the possibility of calling me to help fix things when the services on that machine didn’t talk to the network post-reboot. Once I got up this morning, I spent about 30 mins figuring out what state the various bridges were in and then Google led me to victory in about another 30.

For a period of a few hours, I had no DNS service, as the machine I was using as a secondary DNS server was experiencing related but not identical failure; a failure of redundancy that I will soon remedy. That led to a bit of mail bouncing, if it was sent to shaver@off.net or shaver@mozilla.org, so please do resend if you were thusly victimized. My blog was also down for a bit, not that anyone is likely to care about that.

I’m not sure if it’s irony or demand creation, but the same company that I have now put behind me offers a high-availability network access service — clearly, I should have availed myself of it.

I took a day off today to get some stuff done around the house, and to put some new drives in the server that hosts this blog, among other wonders.

Once we got into the server hosting space, which was mildly exciting, things went downhill in a hurry:

I had 4 drives in my backpack, and 4 drives in the machine, but only capacity for 6 drives of this size (3.5″). I did not have the right kind of screwdriver to manipulate the front panel of the machine — and to fit the 5th and 6th drives, even, I would have to remove the CD-ROM and media-bay stuff. And get more sleds.

While I was removing the CD-ROM, and discovering that the chassis probably wanted an adapter of sorts to enjoy these new drives at all, I managed to stick my left pinky a little into the whirling maw of pain that is a chassis fan. That little mother was really spinning, because the impact sent a blade flying off the fan, and sent me to St. Mike’s to get a tetanus shot and have a doctor inspect my now-oddly-hamburger-like pinkytip.

So now I need:

• 2 drive sleds,
• possibly, some conversion kit to go from ‘4 x 3.5″ drives plus media bay’ to ‘6 x 3.5″ drives without media bay” on a Dell Poweredge 2950,
• two new chassis fan modules,
• someone to work the shift, control and command keys on my computer for a little while,
• a picture of the blood spatter on the sticker that says “don’t put your finger in here when the power’s on, moron”.

And I’m totally going to need another day off at some point soon, after this mess.

(Oh, I also lost my book somewhere today, possibly at lunch, so I had to buy another copy.)

One thing about work: Stuart has a truly excellent post about memory work in Firefox. The sort of post I’ve been wanting to figure out how to write for some time, and he just plain-out nails it.

One thing about not-work: my lovely sister Steph is featured in an article in the Montreal Gazette, which — in spite of the strange headline and conspicuous lack of photo — I found quite enjoyable.

I’m back at work today for the first time since life changed completely and wonderfully two weeks ago. Thanks to everyone for their congratulations, support, and good wishes; they are very much appreciated by all three of us.

I have a pretty good-sized backlog of mail, and I suspect it’ll take me most of today to get through it, but if you are waiting for a response from me and don’t get something by the end of tomorrow, you should feel welcome to send me a gentle reminder. I will be on IRC and IM for your gentle-reminding needs.

In the interim, you can entertain yourselves with cute baby pictures:

October 16, 2007, 22:29 Eastern. Six pounds, fourteen ounces. Awesome.

Mom and Claire are both doing fine, I’ll be away daddying for the next 2 weeks, so don’t expect response to work stuff and you will be less disappointed.

(Awesome.)

Update: the thought of gifts is appreciated, but unless you’re going to bring them yourself so that you’ll have the joy of meeting her, I would much rather you make a donation in her honour to SickKids. We have been blessed with a healthy baby, but not every baby is as lucky as Claire, and the great folks at SickKids work hard to make sure that every baby gets what they need to be happy and healthy.

Between the frantic reskinning of AMO, the general hubbub of the Firefox 2 release, and then preparing for and delivering my FSOSS keynote, last week was pretty much non-stop adrenaline. I was completely exhausted by Thursday night, to the extent that I actually stayed on campus rather than try to get up Friday morning in time to defeat Toronto traffic for a 9AM keynote slot back up at the Seneca@York campus, but the conference itself was enough of a source of energy that I managed to keep rolling until relatively late in the evening.

Saturday was spent sleeping and traipsing about the city as part of Madhava’s bachelor party, which was not exactly a meditative exercise itself. Ridiculous fun, of course.

So today I’m feeling pretty weird, I have to say. I’ve been quietly working through my backlog of “deal with this later” stuff — mostly context, but some of it perilously close to core — and letting the novel and welcome sensation of choosing my own next steps wash over and around me. I will readily admit, to the surprise of nobody, that I enjoy the rush of execution and the feeling of making decisions “live”, but I’m really looking forward to spending a few days taking a fresh look at the paths I was on before the explosion of the last 2 weeks. If nothing else, it’ll be nice to have “am I forgetting something important?” downgrade from “certainly” to “possibly” for a while.

And I should do some laundry, too.

I’ll probably — hopefully? — be less present/active in my usual interrupt-driven communication environments for a bit, but if you need me I’m sure you can reach me without too much trouble…

I, Mike Shaver, love Philip Imperial Schwan with all my heart.

Je vous remercie pour votre attention. [tags]personal, phik[/tags]

Getting my first eye exam in 2 years today, since I really need to replace my bent and scratched glasses. My prescription is pretty stable, but I got some eye drops that are apparently going to screw me up pretty good for the better part of 8 hours.

I am looking forward to fumbling through customs and security at Pearson this afternoon, liberty bag in tow. With my luck, I’ll end up having some allergic reaction that will leave me unable to drive from SFO — or maybe that’d be vlad’s luck… [tags]personal, travel[/tags]