My last post was July 19th? Oi, I have to do better than that. It’s been a busy summer, what with my classes and regular summer-type activities. No excuse, however!
The family and I took a trip to Arkansas over the summer, to see some extended family. It was our first road-tripsince moving back to Michigan, and we all did pretty well. I loath road-trip vacations as a general rule, but this one wasn’t so bad…sort of. The trip there and back was weather and traffic free, and we got to see a ton of sights. We stopped at the junction of the Ohio and Mississippi, where Lewis and Clark began their push into the West. You could feel the history.
We spent a day or so on the Spring River, picnicing and swimming. My oldest daughter got caught in the rapids, so I got to find out how good of a swimmer I still was (pretty good, actually). She ended up a mile downstream, in some shallows, and pretty darn scared. I got her calmed down, and we slowly made our way back to the beach. Somewhere along the way I lost my wedding band, which when she found out, sent her into tears. We explained to her that it was just an object, easily replaceable, and the important thing was that she was OK. Other than that episode, it was good times and good eats with family.
I wrestled with a stubborn server for the better part of August. We’ve had problems with this particular piece of hardware since it was deployed; three others exactly like it run fine. We asked the vendor to replace it at least twice, and as a result of the latest issue, it just might happen. Long story short, I was installing some routine hardware updates the the server decided that it didn’t like. I got tech support on the phone, and after several hours of troubleshooting, I was advised that I needed to physcially move some internal components around.
Now, I live about an hour away from this particular server, it was about 7am, and I’d already been up since 6am the day before. Nevertheless, I drove on in, and performed the swap as requested. This resolved the initial issue, but caused a cascade effect that brought down the application running on that server. I called the app’s tech support line, and spent the next 12 hours online with them. We FINALLY resolved the cascade problem, only to have it reoccur two days later. Several more support sessions brought us back to the hardware as being the culprit, in particular a intermittent network connection. The pieces involved have been replaced, and the server has been solid for almost a month. We’re still lobbying for a a total swap-out; the previous issues, as well as this latest round of fun, have left us with little confidence in it.
The kids went back this last Tuesday, and I’m looking at the final week of my current class. For those playing the home game, that leaves 4 classes left! I’ll try and find the pictures from Arkansas, as well as update my progress on the Big E, very soon!
RMW
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