Mike’s World

Yesterday afternoon I went to a holiday outing with work, at a bowling alley, and it was fun. I did not get much bowling done, but I did hang out for a bit, and watched others bowl.

Yesterday evening was kind of laid back, I got some xmas shopping done, and got some things wrapped before heading off to bed.
Today I went back to work, after having my surgery, and it was a bit different without my friend being there any longer, just was not the same. I spent the day working on a upgrade proposal, and trying to figure out how to do some SAN stuff. Overall not very exciting.

This evening I went to a going away party for someone I worked with at a prevous job. It was fun seeing people I had not seen in years it seems. Half of the people did not even recoginze me.

Well I am on day 3 of recovering, and it is going very good. Saturday sucked, Sunday evening I was able to move around a bit, and today I was able to get out of the house a bit.

Sunday I watched some movies (LOTR two towers) and the vikings game, and today I got a bit of shopping done, got my car cleaned, and watched the 3rd LOTR movie.

Tomorrow I better get out of the house, or else I am going to go insane!

About a month ago I noticed funny bump, in a funny place, kind of right below my gut. Now, this is where 1000 thoughts start going throw your head (well at least mine). Thoughts such as:  should I ignore it? Is it going to get worse? Is it going to get better? It is a lump, is it cancer? I hope not! What if I go to the doctor, is it a waste of time? Should I go to the doctor?

In the end, I decided to go to the doctor, and get it checked out. My general physician determined it is most likely a hernia, and referred me to a surgeon to determine the next action that should be taken. So I then saw a sergon, and I walked out with a surgery scheduled, and today was the for-mentioned surgery.

When I saw the surgeon, my mind was still in shock, so I did not ask the normal questions such as how long I should be out of work, or what resreictions I would have with sergery, do I was kind of winging it. Today I needed a distraction big time to get my mind off of things, so I ended up going shopping, getting something for Mandy for her Son and going in to work to deliver it. That killed the 3 hours keep my mind busy:-)

My friend Lisa then came over to pick me up, and go to the hospital with me. I decided to go for a local instead of getting knocked out, and once again I was happy with that decision. This time I had a bit more pain then the last sergery I had, but I was kind of expecting that, I am looking forward to seeing the list of drugs they gave me.

I think I was in for about an hour, and they made a cut about 5″ long, fixed whatever they had to fix, put in a  mesh thingie to heal the wound, and then closed me up. I remember looking at a clock, and seeing it was 2:30, my procedure started at 1:00pm.

The pain this time is quite a bit more than my last surgery. On the way home we stopped to pick up my prescription, to find that it would be a  4 fscking hour wait for my pills. We then headed home, and THANK GOD I had some left over vicodin from my last procedure. I was in and out, just rested up and talked to Lisa while watching tv and movies. I could not move at all without feeling pain, so it was very nice of my friend to stick around, she even spent the night which I was not initially expecitng at all. In the end, I was honistly not sure how I was going to be in the morning, so it was nice having her stick around.

We will see how I am doing tomorrow, but man does this pain suck!

Today was a great day, I must say. I had to tie up some loose ends as I am going to be out tomorrow, so it was quite hectic today for me, in between trying to get things taken care of and meetings. Today is also the last day I was going to see a friend at work, and half of the team is out tomorrow, so we had a nice going away lunch for her and another coworker. About 20 people showed up to wish them farewell, which was nice.

After work I visited with my friend and her family, and it was very nice. Her son was not in the best of moods, but I have seen much worse. First we went shopping, then hung out for a bit, being entertained by their Son, then went out to dinner. It was very nice, and I now feel better that we will still be able to maintain a friendship with her moving on to another job. I think it will also give me the opportunity to get back in touch with someone I have known for years, that I have drifted apart from, as she will now be working with someone I was good friends with.

Today was exactly what I needed to pick my spiits up, and I can now concentrate on my fun for tomorrow, you can read more about that next :-)

This week at work we had some on-site training arranged to go over Solaris zones, Solaris SMF and patch management with Solaris 10. On the first day, Monday, we went over basic Solaris zones. How to create zones, how to configure zones, how to remove zones, etc. Solaris zones are a unique feature in Solaris, that allows for several isolated Solaris instances to be run within one physical server. It does not have the physical constraints of Solaris domains, it is described to be like BSD jails.

The next day, Tuesday, we went over backing up and restoring Solaris zones. Each zone has its own isolated  directory structure, so to back it up is very straight forward.  The next topic we went over was resource management, Each zone can have CPU shares, CPU caps and memory caps assocuated with it, to prevent one zone from taking over the entire server.

On day three we went over the solaris SMF, or Service Management Facility which has been integrated in to Solaris 10. SMF is a whole new framework that has been added to Solaris to manage the starting and restarting of daemons in Solaris, which replaces the old rc.* method of managing daemons.

The final thing we discussed was Solaris patching. With Solaris 10, they redid patching, to be more like what redhat does and whatnot, where the OS talks to a central patch server for managment. It is very cool, if it works.

Overall I found this traning to be very useful, and puts our team in to a good position to support Solaris 10 long term.

Today was an interesting day. This morning a friend from work called me to see if I wanted to go see the Body Worlds exhibit at the science museum of Minnesota Saturday evening. I was up for it, as I have heard lots of good things about this exhibit. We looked in to going, and we found out that advanced tickets are only sold in advanced, and a set number of people can attend during any given time period. We went on-line to see that the only openings at 3:00am and 4:00am. We talked over it a bit, and decided why the hell not, and got our tickets for 3:00am.
I went over to a friends house for Saturday night movies, and we watched Team America. I had forgotten how offensive that movie was, but what else do you expect from trey parker. After movies, I went to meet up with the work dude for the body worlds show.

We started off going to Mickey’s Diner in Downtown saint paul for some food. This is the first time I had gone to Mickey’s, and it was very interesting, a old school dining car with good food. After eating we made it to the science museum by 1:00am or so, and walked around a bit to some of the exhibits. It was amazing how busy the place was at 1:00am!

We then went to the Human Body omni theater show. This was a  show on how the human body functions, from how cells develop, to things how the brain functions and how the body reacts to the environment around it. After the omni show, we went off to the Body Worlds exhibit. I was very impressed with what they had on display, it is amazing how much work went in to putting this together. I know that all of the body parts are real, but I just do not want to think about that.

We went around Body Worlds until 5:30am or so, and had left the museum by 6:30am. I then dropped my friend off, and grabbed a bite to eat before heading in to work. Today we had to upgrade a production server from AIX 5.1 to AIX 5.2, and overall it went very smoothly. We ran in to one problem with the backup, but overall it could have gone worse. This morning I worked with the coworker that is leaving us later this week, so it was nice to have the time to hang out as well. The team at work is changing quite a bit, and I think I am going to miss the great team we had spent so much effort to try to build. It is hard seeing people go, but they all have their reasons.

After the work, i got back home at about 1:00pm, and laid down for a short nap. I was up by 4:30pm, and was able to get my car cleaned up a bit. Headed out to the gym, then headed out to the MOA for some christmas card shopping.

That wraps up this weekend. I thought this was going to be a real rough weekend for me, but getting to the wild game on Friday, then going to Body Worlds on Sunday morning and being able to spend a bit of time with my friend Sunday at work made the weekend bearable.

Today was a interesting day at work. It had been a very easy going morning to start with. Lee was getting ready to leave to his new job, the weekend was coming up, so not much was going on. I just spent the morning closing tickets from being oncall and whatnot. Next we have training, so i am trying not to get to much going on. When the afternoon hit, man did things change. First I had a interesting meeting with my boss at work, which I am not going to go in to the details about, then a server puked on me.

A server had filesystem errors on two filesystems /opt and /usr. We brought the system down to fsck the filesystems and it they had tons of errors. After bringing the server up, it crashed again within 5 minutes. I ended up ripping out Solaris Volume Manager, and after I did that it looks like it is staying up. Looking at the sun case this morning, it looks like a known bug, but I will deal with that on Monday.

I was at work dealing with the for-mentioned server until 5:30pm or so, and just as I got home and pulled in yo my driveway Paula calls me looking for Lee’s phone number. They had plans to go to the Wild game this evening, and Lee was missing in action. She then asks what I am doing tonight, and mentions that her Mom has an extra ticket. Sure, I am up to watching a game in real person instead on tv, sign me up!

Got to the game to watch the wild loose 3 to 0, but I am always up to social events, for me any social event is better than  sitting at home alone.  I got to visit with Paula’s mom a bit, a real sweetheart and Paula’s boyfriend as well. He so reminds me of my brother in law.  After the game, went out to Wild Tymes bar and visited with Lee and his nephew for a bit. Other times I have gone to the bar after a wild game, they are just packed. This one was not very busy at all, which I liked. I am not much of a bar person, but I I think it is because I do not like the need to yell at the top of your lungs to carry a conversation. Last night Lee did a good job of pacing his drinking at his party, but tonight he did not do as good of a job. It is always fun hanging out with him, he just has a ton of stories. His nephew can do a good job of talking your ear off as well.