The long and the short of it? I've been off living my life.

Of course, I have been wanting to write and record as I go. The problem is that when you are so busy with day-to-day living, you don't get a chance to do things like that.

For the most part, that means going to work, enjoying time off, and trying to have a semblance of a normal life. Of course, life anything but normal.

First, I've been off quite a bit lately; to appease folks at work, they gave us a free day off, so I used it. Also, I have been burning some PTO so I could have some time off. ("When was the last time you worked a full week?" Marilynn asked me. "Hmmm. A month ago," I replied, totally unsure. Sounded about right, though.)

I had some comp time, too. Right before the turn of the year an application server at work decided to take a crap, and the turd in question was the sharepoint for our Oracle clients. Nobody could load up the Oracle client, so that meant a lot of things where I work, including billing, fundraising, medical imaging, admissions, insurance, so on and so forth, were down. This is a very Bad Thing™.

Of course, since network administration couldn't get the preexisting application server to start coughing the files up to clients again, it was decided to move the client to a new server and redirect all the client devices there. Being the Desktop scripting guy, this means it was up to me. Fun.

One late Friday night, one long Saturday spent with Delphi and Wise Package Studio and one SMS push later, and we were on our way. Monday and Tuesday were spent cleaning up fires here and there, applying patches for this and that, and generally building out all the additions we needed to. While it's not something that I want to repeat a lot, this had the distinct advantage of getting all our client machines up to the same version of the client - we had things as far back as Oracle 8.0.5.

Interesting fact - this application server had over 60 sharepoints on it, and runs up to seventy applications, many of them actually running on the box. I bet you're expecting that it was a big, monster multiprocessor Xeon box with gobs of RAM, huh? No, it was a Pentium Pro, 200 MHz, 1.5 gigs of RAM. It was first installed in 1997 and is running NT 4.0 (I have no idea what service pack level). The story goes, "this app doesn't need its own server - can we run it on this apps server?"

I am extremely disappointed in my employer.

(At least that first night when I was more-or-less hanging out waiting to do whatever I needed to, I got to fix up all the old links and graphics in this journal and the other one.)

I decided to do a good deed and put some phone lines over at Moogie's, too. (Well, my grandmother bitched at me about it, so I figured I should go ahead and take care of it.) Marilynn and I went over and began to run the lines.

The problem with this? My mother's home is full of dust, and we also discovered a large collection of mold and mildew here and there. Couple this with the fact that it was bitterly cold and raining outside (where some of the work needed to be done) and I forgot my jacket, plus I'd been fighting Marilynn's cold or flu for days, the time was rife for becoming sick.

By 11:00 PM Saturday, I was wracked with a dry cough and couldn't lay down without my airways closing up. Not too long after that I was having severe trouble getting my breath, and felt dizzy a couple times, almost to the point of passing out. Come 3:00 AM, Marilynn was threatening to call an ambulance if I didn't get dressed so we could go to the emergency room.

About six hours later, we were home after I'd received adrenaline, steroids, breathing treatments and a super-dose of antihistamines. I was out of it chemically, she was out of it from just being awake so long, and I'm on the road to recovery (knock on wood).

It doesn't bother me that I got sick so much as I told my mother that I thought it was a bad idea for me to be doing that. I offered to have Southwestern Bell call out a technician, but she wouldn't hear of that. Instead, I got to spend the night at the hospital.

I wish my family would listen to me. They have this thing that you'd put a thousand dollars of effort in to save an actual dollar. I have another name for it - a penny wise, a pound foolish. Of course, I'm no better going around reinventing wheels, writing a personal content management system when so many exist that I could modify to my needs.

It makes me wonder what goes on in my mind, when I complain about someone and I do the exact same thing, just centered around my own particular peccadillos. Of course, it's a form of hypocrisy; I never claimed that it wasn't. To me, it's a source of pride, and I'm sure not letting me pay for a tech to come in is a source of pride to her.

But damn it, she's wanted me to do this for years, and I didn't want to! I don't work on my own car anymore because I have enough money so I generally don't have to do it. The same goes for things like that, to me - why do it half-assed and risk getting ill when the application of a few dollars takes care of the problem? To me it's a no brainer, but...

Other than that, I've just been spending my time fixing this and that. Trying to make use of the time off, I'm installing Linux on this Compaq EN and getting it up to snuff. I was installing Mandrake, but I settled on Red Hat - after all, the servers I'll be using have Red Hat on them most likely, and also it just takes too long to install Mandrake. (All those packages!) Now if I could just dig up PHP 4.3.0 in an RPM...

restlessmind