Forgive me reader, for I have slacked, it's been almost two weeks since my last confession. A lot has happened since then. I got a raise and turned down two job offers. So job wise, not much has changed since but at least I'll finally have a little more money left at the end of the month, rather than the other way around.
Last week and the week before I spent entirely too much time in the data center. What's a data center you might be asking yourself. Well, picture a building, a very large building (about the size of 3 football fields next to each other). Remove almost anything resembling a window and other ergonomic features you might expect of a pleasant place to work in. Now add several hundred, if not a thousand servers, tape robots, switches, routers, UPSs (Uninterruptable Power Supplies) and air conditioning. Just for shits and giggles, take away anything you might think you could use as a chair, except perhaps a bin. Over the past two weeks I must have spent at least 60% of my time in there. The noise alone would be enough to make anyone insane, but standing at the back of two 19" racks with a 61 node cluster with over 200 fans blasting hot air into your face as you stand behind the terminal cart for 11 hours really does one's head in. I took some pictures of the cluster in question but the regulations say that I need to get clearance to publish them first, so I guess that's a no-go then. Don't get me wrong, playing with this kind of cutting edge technology is nice, but not if you have to be in the same room as it. Remote management is great, but only if it has been configured to work, which in our case, it wasn't.
Needless to say I have been a little reluctant to sit in front of my laptop after several long days in noise-ville.
On the bright side, I got a new toy. It's a Creative Zen Touch. It's got 20GB of hard disc space, so that's plenty for my current collection of MP3s and WMAs. I now have it filled up about 30% or so. The sound quality is awesome, compared to what comes out of my laptop or my little MP3 player. I can now also listen to more than just the same 20 MP3s over and over.
I've been thinking really hard about perhaps going back to Windows XP. I've been using Mandrakelinux 10.1 for a while now, but there's a few things that have been pissing me off. I upgraded the kernel to the latest version for 10.1 but now my USB devices are acting funny. I had to upgrade because of a security advisory but this stinks. I can connect to my laptop with my Clie but after a little while the connection just seems to hang. No more data is transferred and everything just times out. It's a major annoyance but I hesitate to go back to the old kernel. Now in a month or so, the latest version of Mandrakelinux is coming out. They have changed the numbering and naming standard used for their distribution and instead of going to the next logical version, 10.2, they've renamed the next release to LE2005. LE stands for "Limited Edition". Sounds like a shit marketing ploy that will only confuse people. The boot-up screen displays a blue penguin that looks stoned or drunk. It's a real shame that they've headed this way. I sure hope that LE2006 is going to look a little more professional.