From to good to bad in one fell swoop

I know they are folks out there that handle much more in the their day-to-day but let me tell ya. My day started off on a high. I was privy to Adobe's upcoming new software releases. They will end will A CS versus the traditional version number (think Macromedia Studio MX). CS standing for Creative Suite. Creative Suite namely because the apps are meant to work together in a tightly integrated workflow.

Actually I can't say too much because I had to sign an NDA. Yes, it was that much of a secret. All I can say to the folks out there that actually care is that it blew me away! What a day it was, being part of something that cool. But that was the morning, and there was an entire afternoon to cope with.

Of course, as I'm late leaving the presentation, someone decides to shut down a highway lane of my get-to-work-from-the-presentation route. That placed me on the late side of things. I was late for an IT meeting (by 10 minutes, but still). It was time to get set-up for the workday ahead of me. First thing first, check on the server's differential back-up job that was supposed to have run the night before. Guess what? Three guesses. You guessed it. It didn't happen. Oh well, tonight's backup will run and noone will be none the wiser.

What's this? A red LED on one of the hard drives on the server. A little history on this, shall we? We have a Compaq ProLiant ML530. It's packed with 10 - 72GB drives in a RAID set up. Two weeks ago, one of the drives failed. For those that know, servers contain redundant components including hot-swappable drives. You swap the old one out for a new one and all the data rebuilds itself. Simple, right? Well, let's just say things didn't work out as planned, and it wasn't so smooth. Fast forward to this afternoon. I ask you, with one old hard drive needing replacement, why shouldn't all the rest follow suit? I fear that this might turn out to be the case. Then again, as long as only one dies at a time, we're safe. So now I need to make that call to Compaq for a replacement. The silver lining with all this bad luck is that the hard drives are still covered under warranty. Thankfully Murphy and his stupid law skipped over this situtation.

I imagine sometime next week four will fail simultaneously. The ideal situtation would be that one drive would die, get replaced, the next one would die, get replaced, and so on. If all the drives can die and get replaced before the warrant is up then I'll be golden. Maybe this is a blessing?

Anyhow, point being is that there is never anytime to sit down and relax. Constantly running around putting out fires. On one hand there are fewer fires these days; on the other hand the fires tend to be much larger usually equating to much more work in the end.

I've ranted enough and maybe you're not even reading this post anymore. If you are, congratulations. You've officially been diagnosed with read-anyone's-blog-because-blogs-are-cool syndrome. Honestly, I don't expect anyone to read or even visit my blog. If they do great, if not that's okay too. I suppose it's gives me a place to vent when everyone else is too busy to listen.

I'm a keep-my-feelings-inside kinda guy. Until next time.