I moved on the weekend and decided to make the symbolic move here as well. So from now on my ramblings will be at:

Chris' Musings

as well as

A Glimpse Into My Mind

until I decide the one on which I will concentrate.

Unfortunately, they do not both have all of my posts, so you have to visit both to get a clear historical picture. The most recent posts are in both blogs however.

See you there (hopefully)!

Cheers!

First, I should mention that after having no luck whatsoever in getting a Full backup started for the server I was talking about yesterday, at 5am the regular backup started and it proceeded without problems. Go figure! I did notice that the backup was killed on purpose late afternoon, but since I had already left the office I do not have the details.

The reason I left the office early is that today was the day where we went to the lawyer's office to sign the papers and hand in the cheque to pay for the house. So that part is done and the dream is almost a reality - 3 days 10 hours and change before the movers show up. We will take possession of the house the day before, so we will have already slept in the new house by the time the movers come.

Good night!

Remember that robot I mentioned was bought without a barcode reader? Well it looked like it was going to be work out, but for the last few days we have been having no end of trouble trying to get the backups to work. It looks like when there are a lot of files to backup the gathering of information takes too long and the backup times out. I guess I will be trying to figure out why that is, although probably one of my co-workers will be the one doing that.

Only a few more days! 4 days 9 hours and change to be exact. The excitement is building as I type.

Good night!

Although the complex manager had said that he would be showing the townhouse to renters this morning, only the complex handyman was with him when he arrived. He looked around and made notes about things that needed to be fixed and then said that the renters would be coming around 6pm to look at the place. Apparently they had been shown another unit in the complex and had rented this place sight unseen.

Well we were ready for them to show up at 6pm, but they never did. We waited almost 30 minutes and then left to go for dinner. When we came back a couple of hours later, there was a voice mail waiting saying that the people were late and would show up between 7:00 and 7:15pm. Of course we were not there so I do not know if they did come.

Good night!

We got a letter from the manager of the complex this morning giving us the required 24 hour notice before intending to come and enter our townhouse. The reason for the visit? He is showing the townhouse to prospective renters! I just cannot believe that they are going to show this townhouse to anybody before:

1. having had a look themselves;
2. having made any repairs; and
3. waited until next week when most of the boxes and clutter would have been gone.

We have lived here for 20 years now and there has been minimal maintenance done on the unit. We still have the original carpets from 20 years ago! Oh well... It is not my problem.

I have thrown out more computer equipment today: modems this time. It turns out I had one of pretty much every generation of modems. I was missing the 300 baud one, but otherwise the list is pretty complete: 1200, 2400, 9600, 14400, 28800. I think the only reason I do not have whichever modem comes after the 28800 is that we got onto cable by then. I have also thrown out floppy diskettes by the hundreds: mostly 3.5 inch floppies, but I also had quite a few 5.25 inch ones.

I think the term is pack rat.

Good night!

Well I did not phone around, but I did go on the vendor web site for the autoloader and it turns out that there is no option to install a barcode reader for this particular model. Great....

I missed the change from double to single digits in the countdown yesterday, sorry about that. I guess you will have to make do with knowing that there is now 8 days 11 hours and change before the move begins in earnest. I guess that means that I better get my act together and my stuff in boxes...

Good night!

In a backup environment as large as ours (we have almost 2 petabytes of data stored on about 16 thousand tapes) it is an absolute necessity that we be able to easily find where the data is stored. The way we do this is by using barcode labels on each tape which the tape robots read and pass on to our backup software. Imagine my surprise then when I found out today that our latest robot purchase (a small 8 tape autoloader for a special project) does not have a barcode reader! Which means that we now have no automated way to link a tape to its data. Someone is now going to have to keep track of this information manually! Why do we do these things to ourselves? I guess tomorrow I get to phone around to see if that particular autoloader can have a barcode reader attached to it. What fun...

Good night!