life, in snippets

Life, she is a strange place.

Because of my religious background, I’ve never celebrated my birthday. I’ve never felt like I missed out, either – it’s just been How Things Were. Mum always acknowledged the day somehow, but the whole cake/candles/party traditions were out.

You can probably work out just from the above, let alone previous posts, what faith I grew up in. I try to avoid naming it; I may have left, but my family (and many others I have a lot of respect for) believe as strongly as they ever did. I admire their faith – my leaving doesn’t alter that.

Come to think of it, that may be partly why Mum took to my leaving as calmly as she did. She knew I wasn’t going to go to the other extreme and faithbash any opportunity I had.

However. I turned 23 yesterday. And I discovered all over again that I have generous friends.

…I’m really a little overwhelmed. I have been shouted lunch (twice, thanks Reiv and Colitis), given a Discworld tshirt (… which just YAY, Pratchett, thankyou AuntieTekkie), really pretty jewellery (Thanks Filmy, you know my taste well!) along with a hilarious “Happy First Birthday!” card, and the Tobermory? Well, he’s… generous to a fault, is all I’m going to say about that. (And also that I have new shinies which apparently I turned into a twitterpated toddler about yesterday.)

It’s simultaneously overwhelming, touching, and OMG COOL STUFF.

I have purchased a couch, at long last. It is a three seater fold out sofabed, and the lovely Deb is going to assist me with it’s relocation on Wednesday.

Hooray for Deb.

The couch, as per usual for a purchase of mine, came via trademe, and has not cost me very much. I am pleased by this, as you would expect.

I went out on Saturday, and amongst the group at the bar was someone who moved to New Zealand from Germany nine days ago. We’ve swapped email addresses, and a couple of emails. New friends are always good.

I realised today that GT has me wound around his little paw. He mowed and mowed at the door, I let him in. He promptly walked over to the edge of the path, stared intently at the usual location of a puddle (he drinks from this puddle daily, it’s disgusting). And I, being a Good Human, filled up the dish I keep for the kitties with water. He drank and departed.

I am a sucker. But a happy sucker.

Work has been rather maddening this week.

I spent most of Monday wandering around in a chemical daze, as I’d hazed off a migraine with excessive panadol and naps. Thus, Mahal no workee.

Tuesday, I decided that I was sick of poking the tired nameserver every few hours with the wakeup stick. Thus, I rebuilt on new shiny hardware. Well, ok, not so new. And if I’m honest, not so shiny either. But better.

Server was inserted in rack on Thursday, after other things intervened. Server worked for an hour. Server then went Boom. Mahal swapped Old server for Newer server back again. New server obviously just wanted a few hours off, as it’s behaved irreprehensibly since.

Cue Mahal stalking through the colocation facility swapping around server boxen, mumbling about cunting misbehaving bloody fucktarded server boxen that oh yes, work FINE on my desk at home, SURE, and I go to all the cunting effort to get the bloody thing in the top shelf of the rack which required moving a mail server out of the way first and NOW you decide not to work, sodding arseholes what more do you want?

After tirading away quietly to myself, I realized there was a Man standing on the other side of the rack, trying (and failing) to conceal the fact he was collapsing in laughter at my antics. My face went as enpurpled as my hair as I blushed.

That wasn’t my only tired server. A webserver I spend a lot of time on was also complaining and grumbling. Neither me nor boss#1 (linuxen man) could work it out – all we saw was Apache periodically opening a few hundred processes, the server running out of ram, and gasping like a dying fish.

Then, Lights Dawned for Bossman today.
One of those sites is customised quite carefully. And trying to run the standard cron backup on it was causing mysql issues – which was then causing apache issue. We only saw the apache issues at first.
Because that, after all, was the ONLY SYMPTOM, dammit. Today, Bossman had the idea of running all the cron jobs manually; and voila! server go Bing! Boss go Aha!

We have behaviour restored on server now. Yay!

I get to go and teach a nice lady how to use Moodle, next week. Yay teaching. My enthusiasm at this suggestion implies that I really do need to get my teaching certs at some stage.