Mike’s World

Today after work was the going away party for one of our team members. This fellow has been a mainframe guy for years, and as the mainframe side of the house was not looking to hot, he switched over to UNIX. Now that the company overall is not looking very hot, he is going back to what he loves, MVS. This evening at the Blue Fox we had his going away party, and he had a great turnout! People he have worked with for years, and who he has not worked with for years showed up to send him off to his new opportunities. It was nice seeing people even I have not seen in years. His party lasted until 8:30 or so, which is one of the longer ones I had been to.

Today got off to a great start. When I got home from speed dating last night I was going to set my alarm clock, because I had to be at work at 8:00am for a server upgrade (more on that later). Well, I forgot to set my alarm clock, and instead of getting to work at 8:00am, I woke up at about 8:00am. The missing scotch in my house just might explain the extra 2 hours of sleep.

We are working on upgrading one of our environments from AIX 5.1 to AIX 5.2. We did an initial upgrade of the development server in the environment, the application tested out fine, and all was good. Because we have a limited window for the production server, we decided to restore the server from a mksysb backup and do the upgrade again to get some better timings and get some documentation done up.

Well, after sleeping in I send Mandy a quick AIM message to find out the mksysb restore was a complete failure, and that was just the start of this little adventure.  With AIX, you can boot off of CD, Network (NIM), local drives or a bootable mksysb tape. With remote support in mind, we had the idea to attempt to boot off of network and restore our backup off of tape. We booted the server off of the network, and in the server install options, the restore from tape option was missing. We selected what would be the tape option, and it worked. The server started to read the tape and restore the operating system. It turns out after about 15%, the restore failed. We attempted again, and it failed again. Looking at the system, it looks like when AIX netboots, it loads the boot environment in to a ram disk, and during the restore this ram disk filled up. We then gave up on network booting, and booted off of CD to do the restore. This time it worked.  When I left work, the AIX upgrade was going right along, and we should be all set for our production upgrade on Sunday.

This mornings weigh in, 239.4. Yay, I broke 240!

Today has been kind of a trying day for me. I have seen co-workers come and go, it is a part of the job. In todays day and age, you do not stay at a job for 20 years and wait for a nice pension to come up, people are lucky to stay at the same place for 5 years, especially in the IT industry. I have gotten to know the people I have worked with quite well, and have developed some good friendships. A good friend of mine has been looking at a opening that crossed their path, and it looks like they are going to move on to that position. In the end it is a good opportunity. I have lost touch with several people over the years due to job changes, and this is a case where I do not want this to happen this time, as I truly enjoy being around this friend and their family.

So, enough about that, and on to the second half of my day :-)

This evening I gave speed dating another shot. The last time I did this a month or so ago, and did not have much luck. The last time around, the age ranges where 20-30 year old, and this time it was 25-35. I think with a more mature crowd, I might click better with people, and I think I did. Of the 9 people that attended, I think I would not mind seeing 4 of them again, which is better than last time. In fact, I had a great conversation with 2 or 3 folks. A bonus was that the place the event was at had 18 year old scotch :-)
When I got home, I chatted with my friend for a bit, and watched a good movie called Saint Ralph. I decided I could use a nice film this evening as I finish off a bottle of wine I had in the fridge.

With my latest effort to start loosing weight, I figure I will start updating my blog entires with my weight loss progress. Todays count was 240.0lbs, which is a loss of 13 lbs since I have started working at it a month or so ago. I would love to get below 200 again.

Today was kind of a reality check day for me. Today the day started off all fine and good, until I went to read my email.  A friend of mine got laid off from his job today :-(

He has been at his current job for about 3 years, and was the kind of person to stick up for the people around him. I am sure he will be missed by the people he worked with, but it gives him a chance to move to something he might enjoy a bit more.

Today at work was not all that exciting. I worked on writing a script to help detect a Veritas storage foundation bug we ran in to. The bug is that a veritas config file gets corrupt, and the veritas disk ID does not match the OS disk ID.  It is a very annoying bug.

After work I went to my personal trainer, and I had a very good session. I was able to do 10 push-ups, and I can almost do sit-ups all the way without assistance. This may not sound like much, but for me it is a big step. When I lost weight I lost quite a bit of muscle, and I have been able to recover from that. Now that I am working on loosing weight again, it is very helpful not loosing the muscle mass again.

For the evening, I went to my friends house for moral support. We ended up watching two classic movies as we drank whatever was in the house. I was smart and picked up two bottles of coke zero on my way over, so i was set for the evening, as I could use a bit of help relaxing as well :-).

The movie selections where better off dead, and canadian bacon.

Today I decided to go and brave the MOA to get some Christmas thinking done. I had to figure out what I was getting everyone else, and everyone else has been bugging me asking what I want. This was the first, but not the last time I am going to end up at the MOA this Christmas season. This is the first time I have seen the mall all decked out with the Christmas goodies. They had the giant trees in the rotunda area, and the place was filled with live music. I managed to go around the first and second floors, but did not have time to go around the third floor. I did end up getting several ideas for folks, and several for myself.

After going around the mall, I headed off to the movies. I have always enjoyed movies by Christopher Guest, and he has a new one called For Your Consideration. In the past his films have been fake documentaries, but this one is different. For Your Consideration follows the production of a movie, as well as the people involved with the movie, kind of poking fun at the movie industry. I found this movie quite funny, in classic Guest fashion. I just might to see this movie a second time.

Well, today was the day we had to leave the cabin. It is nice getting away from things for a bit, but I also enjoy my routines, and it is nice getting back to them. This morning after waking up, we watched some home movies my grandmother had converted from film to DVD. They are from my dad’s family from back in the 1960’s and early 70’s. The DVDs had some problems, so I took a copy home to try to see if I can fix them up a bit. It is nice that she has the option to convert them off of film to a format that will last a bit longer.
We had lunch (yep, turkey again) before we had to leave at about 2:00pm or so. Traffic was not all that bad, and what I remember from the trip home was that the wind was very calm. On the way home, Mille Lacs Lake had no wind what so ever. The lake did not have a single wave, and because of this I was able to see across the lake for the first time in the 28 years I have been going past this big lake.

I got home at about 5:30pm, dropped my father off then it was off to my friends house for an evening of talking and movies. They just got a cute little kitten named Annie, and this is the first time I have been over with the cat out roaming around the house. Last time I was over this little beast was confined to one room. This little cat was just all over the house, I had forgotten how much energy these beasts have, you never know what these little kittens are going to get in to.

I am just happy that their 18 year old cat did not have a heart attack or something. I was not sure how the cat Spike was going to handle the new little kitten. My friends had a good idea of letting the new kitten hang out in a isolated room for a week or so before letting it loose on the entire house.

The movie selections for the night where eight legged freaks and Saved. The movie Saved kind of reminds me of Saint Ralph, which I may need to pop in again.

Tomorrow we will be heading back from the cabin, so today was the last full day at the cabin. As I mentioned, my grandmother cooks for an army, so we had thanksgiving dinner again for lunch, which is ok. Today we finished up our work on the cabin, and noticed that the roof is going to need to be replaced. That work will wait for another day. We got all of the fascia boards replaced, and that should help keep some animals out during the winter.

After finishing up on the cabin, I did get a walk in to Boy River. The area is all dirt roads, and about 4 miles from our cabin, which is on boy lake, is a bridge that goes over boy river which connects boy lake to leach lake. The river was about a foot lower than normal, but it was still flowing. After making it to the river, I did walk down a bit more down a driveway and found a real neat little camping/hunting area on the river. It was starting to get dark outside, so I decided to head back.

While I was on my walk, my Uncle Steve worked on piling up some wood he brought over for a bonfire. He must have spent a good 3 hours working on this wood pile, and it ended up being a classic tee-pee boy scout pile, but very large. Unfortunately Uncle Steve had to leave (work called him away) but as the sun set, me and my father with the assistance of some fuel got the fire going.

After the fire died down, we went up to visit with Grandma a bit more, and then it was bedtime.

as I mentioned yesterday I headed up to my cabin on Big Boy Lake for the thanksgiving holiday. The property contains the old 2 room (no, not two bedrooms, two rooms) plus one bath building that was built by my grandfather back in 1969 or so (the building on the left) In addition to the cabin is a house that was built around 1992, which is the building on the right.

With the cabin being so old, every so often we need to do work to keep the building up and standing. This time around, the fascia was getting old and starting to rot out, which was one more place for animals to get in. This trip up, we wanted to get the old rotten fascia boards replaced with some new fresh wood, which we did accomplish over two days.

I did make it down to the lake today, and I noticed two things. First of all, the lake was completly frozen over, but just a thin layer of ice. On top of that, the water level was quite a bit lower than I have seen in the past. I think I may walk down to the river tomorrow and see what that looks like, with the water so low.

After a day of hard work, it was time to head in for thanksgiving dinner. Grandma did her normal thing of cooking a meal for twice as many folks than we needed. Thanksgiving dinner was with me, my father, my uncle and his wife, my grandmother and her friend. It was a very nice time, and it was nice being able to visit with family for a bit.

Today the plan was to take a half day at work, get up north, and get out of the cities before traffic got to bad. The plan for the most part went as I wanted.

I got a bit of work done this morning, and headed out at about 12:30pm, just in time to get to my 1:00pm appointment with my trainer for a session before heading out for the long weekend. It was nice getting one more workout session before heading out. Got home, all set to get out, then I ended up chatting with a friend for a half our or so while I packed, then once I got all packed up, I chatted with my neighbor for about 20 minutes before getting my father and getting out of town.

We got out early enough to avoid most of the traffic, the only traffic we ran in to was just on the north side of the cities, which is much better then past years. The only exciting thing about the drive up north was that the wind turbine in elk river, mn was just booking. It was going faster than I have ever seen it go before. We got up to the cabin at about 7:30pm or so, and was able to chat with family for a bit before bed.

Ok, so I try to not write about political stuff, we have enough political stuff, but I can not believe what I just read.  I am reading <a href=http://slashdot.org>slashdot</a> this morning, and I run across this: <a href=http://politics.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/11/05/1415207>Saddam Hussein Sentenced to Death</a>
Reading this, I could not belive what I saw. Saddam is going to be hung!?! I had thought this was a joke, as I had thought hanging stopped like 50 years ago. I had to go off to CNN, and yep, it is true.