Working weekend

Yet again I spend a weekend working. It does get tiring after awhile, but I’m hoping that the upcoming Memorial Day weekend will get me a little rest and relaxation.

We’re preparing to add more traffic, so we needed new servers to handle the additional load. Most of the parts came in mid-week. Most. One of the cases arrived Thursday, but the second still hasn’t shown up yet. They were ordered at the same time, from the same company, so I’m still not sure why they were shipped seperately. I spent all day yesterday building that one new server. This is a new case (cheaper) than the previous one’s I’ve ordered, so I had to spend a little time learning the new case, but otherwise it went smooth. That was, of course, until it failed to boot, and I disassembled it to find that one of the CPU’s (in a dual processor system) hadn’t seated in the socket properly. The day ended with one working server and one nasty scar on my finger. Typical day of computer building. If you don’t bleed, you’re not doing something right.

Today I’m working again, but luckily I can do so remotely from home. I have to finish configuring software and replicating data to this new server, and finish debugging my code that is set to go into production tomorrow. I really can’t wait to get someone hired to help out with the system building/maintenence portion of things.

Hopefully things go smoothly today. I need to give Shaken, not Stirred and prepare my cover letter to Analog.

Title this!

We’ve had some violent storms this past week. Heavy rain (which we needed), violent lightening and rolling thunder accompanied by strong winds and one confirmed tornado in the area. We were in a drought situation. The winter was the mildest in recent memory and this spring, before last week, had been dry as well. Now we have several local rivers near or at their limit.

The storms did some minor damage in our area. I found a piece of a shingle that might have come from our roof, but I haven’t found any bare patches yet. Our neighbors weren’t so lucky. About a month ago they built a fence around their backyard. They don’t have a fence anymore. Half of the fence was ripped out of the ground and layed flat. It looks to me that they might not have dug the fence posts deep enough, judging from the cement at the bottom of the posts I saw. They were pulling down the rest of the fence yesterday, so I don’t know if they’re going to rebuild it or hire someone to do it.

On the writing front, I’m more than a third of the way through revisions on Shaken, Not Stirred. I’m hoping to finish the edits today sometime and have a copy ready for Dena when she gets home from Minnesota tonight. I want to finish polishing it up and have it in the mail by Friday. Now I need to work on my cover letter to Analog. Once this story is submitted, I’ll keep working on Mirror, Mirror, now that I’ve finally worked out where I wanted tdo go with it.

My free time has been scarce the last couple of weeks. Work has picked up, with one new system being deployed this week and another new system to be designed and written next. The switch from maintenence mode to development and back again continues. The current active development cycle will go for another five or six weeks, and then things will relax again as I shift into maintenence and upkeep for awhile. I’m really looking forward to hiring someone that I can delegate some of the work to, so these development cycles aren’t such a panic.

Frozen in time

I feel like I’ve been idling these past few weeks, treading water but making no real progress. Work has picked up and is once again reaching a critical mass – the development plan looks big enough to occupy a dozen highly trained programmers, not just me. It’s all interesting, well-designed stuff (because I designed it), but I find myself wishing that I had at least one or two qualified programmers to delegate work to. It’s hard to keep up.

I spent last weekend at Penguicon. In a nutshell, if the universe were empty save for two masses of primordial goo, one being science fiction and the other Linux geeks, Penguicon was the big bang that brought them together. I’ve been to both types of conventions seperated, but never one that combined the two ideas. It was an interesting excercise, and I think it’ll be suceessful because of the level of overlapping interests between the two genres. At some time down the road I’ll be writting an essay that deals with some of the finer aspects of the Linux crowd.

I’m still working on edits for Shaken, not Stirred. It’s down to 600 words now, and I want to trim at least another hundred. I’m also doing a fair bit of revising, but keeping the core of the story intact. I’m going to finish the edits and have it sent out to Analog by the end of the weekend, or else.

I fell behind on new writing, unfortunately. I had originally said I wanted to have something submitted to group this week (tonight), but that isn’t going to happen. Once Shaken, not Stirred is sent out I’ll be finishing Mirror, Mirror and submitting to group. That will be ready for the next meeting in two weeks.