"A Day in the Life" is our most requested blog topic currently, so here's another installment. Featured today is Systems Engineer Tom.
Here's the play-by-play:
Uptime: 16:33, Calories burned: ~4500, Calories consumed: Not enough, Emergencies: 0, Commuting close calls: 3
6:47 - Alarm, in form of local child-of-the-80s radio station, goes off. I press snooze 1 time, giving four more minutes of sleep. The song playing was the single from U2's Pop album, Discothèque. I'm tired because my wife, N, and I stayed up too late last night watching 30 Rock episodes on Netflix.
6:52 - Feed cat who purposely knocked food off platform. Yes, master...
6:53 - Move clothes from washer to dryer -- all of my running clothes in there, sitting overnight. They are 12% musty, so I'm using a new dryer sheet to compensate. Being cheap, I tend to use fabric softener sheets 3 or 4 go-arounds. Not this time.
6:54 - Check on sick kitten that we are fostering from the Humane Society -- she's cloistered in bathroom, with no explosive bodily expulsions today. Yes!
7:07 - Slicking in edgy hair fixative product, realizing hair has become too long overnight to be effectively chunky punk.
7:11 - Go out and feed chickens. The sun is up and they know I'm coming out at about this time, so they stack themselves next to the door and topple out when I open it.
7:14 - Attempt to wake up N. No dice.
7:16 - Get breakfast cereal. I eat breakfast every morning before work, so I can be focused. That's not true; it's like a fad diet, where the only allowed food is cereal. My teeth will probably pay the price one day, but the double-pour-and-eat-action sure is convenient. The stay-fresh container, or as Mitch Hedberg said, the fresher, is down to the dregs. So, my meal is all bran, no raisin. It turned into brown Jell-O when exposed to milk. Sproing.
7:17 - I sleep extremely heavily, so I now check phone for alerts I slept through. If I do this before getting ready, it sucks me in and the whole day is thrown off. There were only two load beeps for one of our VPS servers -- not uncommon when dozens of containers are performing maintenance at the same time.
7:22 - Attempt to wake up N. Another swing and a miss.
7:23 - Feed fish.
7:23 - Check if new MySQL backup solution worked last night, catch up on email.
7:30 - Stall a bit because I don't want to be early for my run with Marianne, co-worker and 50% of Team Modwest Half-Marathon.
7:35 - Actually wake up N! Feed the dog.
7:38 - Borrow N's Body Bug. I've been meaning to see what the device thinks of my metabolism and the run today seemed like it would make me look bad-ass. Unverifiable numbers!
7:45 - Start biking downtown to meet Marianne for run. My commutes are always by bike. I've logged over 6000 miles while working at Modwest the past 6 years, according to the Way to Go Club. My commuter for the whole time has been a 2003 Diamondback Topanga Comp.
7:50 - Avoid crazy drivers; they're apparently confused about the road construction and are occupied telling their phones all about it.
7:55 - Stow bike in bike locker leased by Modwest and run to meeting place. Good on them for fostering alternative transportation by providing secure storage.
8:05 - Shouldn't have dawdled, arrived late. Starting run.
9:30 - Completed run, walking it off. Here's the route. I am good going up hills, Marianne's good at downhill. Descents shred my knees. This is my last longish run before the Missoula Half-Marathon.
9:40 - Marianne bought me a Powerade Ion-4 Advanced Electrolyte System (Sour Melon). While being unnaturally radiant green, it was not sour.
10:12 - Answer Ops chat question about automount maps. We're using autofs in a clever and troublesome way so we can have multiple environments in parallel.
10:15 - Install TV antenna Janiel picked up for the office -- we've had a TV in the rumpus room since we moved in nine months ago, and it doesn't get any channels. Blasphemy! Turns out we only can easily get PBS through all the concrete of the Wilma.
10:45 - Back at desk for "queue cleanup day", the day the Ops team does digital janitorial work and slays a few odd jobs -- But, checking support first.
10:55 - Repaired John's broken drop database attempt; he was testing some recent problems people had on db0.
11:00 - Got some music going -- Muse, then Infected Mushroom.
11:45 - Cleanup queue mostly handled. Moving on to little queue inversion projects.
11:52 - Stomach growling, Powerade not cutting it. Cheese'n'crackers time. Sharp.
12:15 - Cage flag created for system tickets. The Ops team has two ticket queues, one for time-sensitive requests, and another for long-term projects. These frequently need kung-fu in the data center. This flag ought to alleviate the question, "Do you guys need anything in the cage?"
12:30 - Working on wrangling our log/temp/etc file management utilities so they're doing their job with our storage changes. Even though disk space is cheap, I don't believe in being sloppy, so I've made this my pet project for the day.
1:13 - Music ran out. Midnight Juggernauts and Kasabian.
2:30 - Finished adjusting and documenting mw_cleanusertmp for now, ran it and freed 20GB+ of space.
3:00 - Finished tuning and documenting mw-compressoldlogs for now, ran it and freed almost 30GB of space.
3:15 - The day-in-the-life epic saga typing continues, in terrible form.
3:20 - Back on log rotation. If only we could just use logrotate.
4:00 - Got error_log truncation working on a new fileserver. Freed nearly 20GB of space
4:21 - Found out N and I might not get to go fishing at nearby Georgetown Lake tomorrow because the ER where she works apparently thinks paying loads of overtime is a good idea. (We actually did get to go, and caught over ten Rainbow Trout between us. It was all catch-and-release.)
4:25 - Packing up to go home and check on le chat. (N working a 10 hour shift, so kitty may be stressed without companionship.)
5:00 - Kitten checked, fed, box cleaned. Catching up on the day's email. I try to ignore email for large portions of the day...for efficiency!
5:15 - Making miva_shuffle script for support team. This script does a song and dance to remedy some occasional file locking problems we encounter with Miva.
6:00 - Jonathan helped me navigate our arcane postgresql backups for our beta webmail system. Gah! It was missing a directory, that is all.
6:15 - Done with miva_shuffle.
6:22 - Wrapping up work, giving animals evening meals. Headed back downtown to meet N for Downtown Tonight.
6:50 - Talked to Marianne about POSIX file permissions -- a customer struggling with getting two users RW access on the same files. Modwest HQ is right outside Caras Park, the hub of downtown summer events. Lucky for me Modwest cares about my results, not my schedule, so it was easy to get some support work done as I came through to the park.
7:00 - Filled John's Chair at the Downtown Tonight Modwest booth and talked with Heather. He was evaluating the brews, she was certain she'd forgotten everything computers while on vacation. Full-Grown Men was the band for the evening.
7:10 - N's here! We're eating at the Thai Spicy booth, Me - Green Curry Chicken, N - Cashew Nut Curry Chicken
7:23 - Ilsa's Lemonade for drinks.
7:45 - Broccoli calzone, I can't remember the real name, for a chaser; I'm still hungry...
8:00 - Bike loaded in car, going to see N's dad, self-deprecating fly-fisher extraordinaire. (http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/extraordinaire -- "Unlike most English adjectives, extraordinaire follows its subject." I never noticed that was particularly unique. Man, this writeup is informative AND entertaining.)
8:30 - Got a fly fishing knot lesson -- the knot we learned is supposedly not in any of the books out there, it seems actually a passcode that grumbly guys with waders and wild hair use to identify the non-posers.
9:00 - Three episodes of 30 Rock while doing house chores.
11:20 - Bed.
Got other ideas for the Modwest Blog? Let us know in the Modwest Community.
-JM
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That was one day? LOL, just jokes. I bet the time stamps are dead accurate.
Posted by: Marianne Blaue | July 16, 2009 at 03:58 PM
Thanks for sharing - what a view into your world. Thanks for all that you do for techno-dummies like me.
Posted by: Gloria O'Rourke | July 16, 2009 at 04:12 PM
I used a notebook for my Day in the Modwest Life reporting -- made things a bit easier since I had to separate from technical tasks to take the notes.
Posted by: Jonathan Neff | July 16, 2009 at 06:48 PM
I like that modwest is happy for work to fit around life rather than life fit around work, that results are what counts.
Posted by: Squiggle | July 20, 2009 at 03:45 PM