Quiet days

Today is really quiet - there's only 3 of us 'ops' people in, and that includes the manager :).

Which means one of two things is going to happen. It'll be peaceful, and I'll have a very productive week. Or everything will go batshit and I'll have chaotic week of frantically putting out fires.

About the only good news is that the other guy who's in today is a Windows/Active Directory specialist, so I can fob off some of the real horrors onto him.

Not nice I know, but everyone has their burdens to carry. Mine are the NAS/SAN, backup servers, VMWare and Unix in general. Fair trade that he gets Mcafee and Active Directory.

In sysadmin land an entity gets designated in proportion to the pain and effort it generates.
So you might have a single server, service, application or generalisation. They'll usually have their 'owner' or more specifically the person that 'knows about' them - even if that is 'has phone number for vendor'

So where we have 'Unix' which is very general, we have 'Mcafee' which is a very specific application. And of the lot, the latter definitely causes more pain and work.

OK, they're not hard and fast divisions, because some stuff are super/subsets of others. But some things are obscure and horrible enough that you Just Don't Mess with it unless the person that knows is about.

I know there should be documentation. It's a holy grail of all IT operations. It's just that in a lot of cases, documentation doesn't quite align with the reality, and so someone has to know what's going on with it :)

Memories

Do you use the memories feature of LJ?
And if so, do you ever go looking through other people's 'memorable moments'?

It can be really quite fascinating - an insight into things that various people have considered 'important'.

Of course, this only really applies to _public_ memories, but there's some few on my friends list who have picked out some rather profound things as memories.

Bad chatup lines

Well, it seems there's a result on the 'bad chatup lines' poll.

We had 6 people say they had used a chatup line (despite having 7 answering the 'did it work' - jambon_gris you're messin' with my polls).

5 of which were reportedly successful, 2 of which weren't.

There was also a male/female division, with the men much more likely to accept a bad chat up line.

(4 out of 13 from the male side of the fence would reject the offer, 8 out of 12 from the female side).

So statistically speaking, if you're female, trying to use a bad chatup line to pick up blokes is relatively likely to work.

Always assuming that my sample is any way approximating a 'normal' population of course :)

SINergy

( Pic of me from SINergy )

And yes, this was in a nightclub in Leicester, no I didn't wander around Leicester dressed like that, and in retrospect barefoot in a nightclub got me some really dirty feet, and I'm kinda lucky that there wasn't any broken glass.