Mike’s World

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.

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.