Why does something as simple as getting a backup have to make my head hurt so much? I just spent two hours talking about backup technologies and techniques. Some of it was esoteric and academic while some of it was very practical and simple.
But the conversation kept wandering off in unproductive directions and I had a lot of trouble keeping people focused. I think that at least for the first hour or 90 minutes I didn’t realize how much I needed to keep bringing people back to what I wanted to accomplish. I kept thinking that everyone in the room wanted about the same thing I did — to backup our development machines.
But some people wanted to argue about what technology was better and what direction the company should go in and about all kinds of things that I really didn’t care about.
I wanted my work to get backed up.
Period.
And after about 90 minutes of talking around the issues I had to start laying down questions and demanding black and white answers. People still tried to take the topic and wander with it, but I kept pulling them back to the questions to which I needed answers.
I wound up with a list of tasks.
Some of those tasks have dates.
All of those tasks have resources who are required to deliver results.
So in the end I guess I got what I wanted. But holy crap it was painful. I think its that I didn’t realize how much direction or management of the topic was going to be required.
Now I know.
Sphere: Related ContentSalon.com has a video of Stephen Colbert at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner. He does about 10 minutes of roasting the bush administration. And its absolutely a roast. He lays in to them pretty good. I wonder if anyone will notice.
Sphere: Related ContentAs is often the case, I am sorry to see the weekend go. It was a very good weekend. On Saturday night my old roommate from college, Chuck, showed up. He was in town for a conference and we stayed up a little later than usual catching up.
Ben and Gabriel have been loving one of Ben’s new birthday presents - a playstation video game called Star Wars: Battlefronts II. It came in the mail from my parents on Thursday and they have been just nuts about it! Just before bed Grace was in the den spinning in circles, wearing her tutu (I gues she was dancing) and she crashed in to the cords going from the controllers to the playstation. The game console came crashing the carpeted floor. Yes, it was only two feet. But it turns out the disc was spinning at thousands of RPM’s and when it fell some kind of scratch was introduced to the disc to make it completely unplayable.
Wow. Ben took it really well, but he was so upset he was beside himself. Grace felt kind of bad, but she’s four and doesn’t get it. I was trying to figure out my alternatives. I could spend the $50 on a new game. I tried cleaning it up and that didn’t work. I could buy one of those little plastic repair kits — but I never thought those things could possibly work.
Then I found out that a video store nearby repairs discs like that with a machine that grinds off a layer of the plastic the discs are made of and then polishes it so it looks like new. For $5.
Done! I dropped the disc off Friday night since they were open until 11pm.
In the morning I dropped him off at the T stop. Afterwards I came home and packed up the van with the first of two loads of paper goods for recycling. The elementary school where my kids go is in a competition to see which school can recycle the most paper, per student. So my neighbor, who is in sales, gave me about 800lbs of brochures and catalogs to donate. I came up with another 200lbs or so myself. So it took me two trips to donate all this. As it turned out, the school is now ahead by of the competition by about 1000lbs.
Heh… those are my 1,000lbs.
I also took the dog to the groomer to get his nails trimmed. For at least a few months we’re going to have his nails trimmed there so hthe vein in his nails will shorten. When they’re a little easier to trim I will take the duty over again. I ran a couple of other erands and came back to the house.
I grabbed Benjamin and we went to the sporting goods store where we bought him a new BMX-style bicycle. He loves it. He’s just crazy about it. I’ll have to take a picture of him on it and post it.
We picked up the video games from the video store on the way home and Ben’s game worked great! Like new!
After a little lunch and twenty winks we went to the boys’ soccer game. It wasn’t bad — they tied. Liz thinks I yell too much. Ben agrees. I guess I should probably back off. I don’t want any of the kids to have any bad feelings about the game — well at least any that I contributed to. I’ll ask the coach if he thinks I should throttle it back a little.
In the evening Chuck returned and we had some delicious indian food for dinner. More talking/visiting.
On Sunday morning we got going early and headed out to Dogtown to do some geocaching. The weather was stunning - blue skies and 60 degrees. It was kind of a long walk, especially for the kids with their short little legs, but we found the first one in about an hour of starting out. Dogtown has a ton of rocks and stones but the paths seem to be in good shape, so it was ok. I think it was probably a mile or mile-and-a-half to the first cache. Then we backtracked to the second. We tried desperately to find the third but there was something wrong with the coordinates.
We wandered around a lot of thorns in the woods for about 30 minutes before giving up. We found some of the landmarks discussed in the cache description about 300ft down the trail so we thought we would see if we could find the cache without proper coordinates. Liz came across a small cairn of stones that looked very out of place and the description said the cache was very well hidden.
She had the boys move the stones aside and it revealed a small brown box wrapped in a plastic grocery bag. This was kind of curious, but Chloe stripped the bag off and Gabriel started turning the box around and around to see how to get in to it. He even shook it a little to see what kind of sound the contents made.
There brown opaque plastic box had a paper tag on one end that Ben started to read aloud. All I caught was “In memorial”.
I took the box and read that tag and was informed that the box contained the “cremains” of Karl Jacobsen, who died in November of 2005 in Duxbury, MA. Actually, I’m not sure about the last name. It started with a “J”.
BUT IT WAS SOMEONE’S ASHES!!
Holy cow! I’ve never disinterred anyone before!! It was kind of creepy and we put it back so quick that I forgot to take a photo of it. But I was shocked! I never expected to find THAT kind of thing.
Amazing.
We never did find the actual cache.
Incidentally, although I haven’t uploaded the pictures here, there is a small album available over at Kodak.com, in case you would like to see what the area looks like.
We left and had lunch at the Salem Beerworks where the waitstaff brought Ben a brownie with whipped cream and a candle and sang him “Happy Birthday”.
he had a grin from ear to ear and LOVED all the attention. I’ve never seen him turn so red!
When we got home Chuck played soccer in the backyard with the boys and we killed a little time before I took him to the train station for his return trip to NYC.
All in all it was an outstanding weekend.
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