12.03.2007
You've all seen Cocktail, right? That cheesy movie from the 80s with Tom Cruise, back when he was the hottest thing around. That's the kind of cocktails I'm talking about.
So... After work today, I went by the grocery-store to pick up some simple dinner that would be fast to make, and I tried to make my visit as quick as possible. Shopping at Rimi ain't exactly grand.
Realising that my supply of beer in the fridge was below critical levels, I decided to pick up a few cans. What do I see? No Urquell. Just great! I had to go for a couple of cans of Frydenlund instead, but oh well... I picked up some food, some shampoo and went to the closest cash-register. Somewhat out there in my own world, listening to Funki Porcini, I didn't really pay much attention until it was my turn to cash up.
Now, now... Just what do I see? The guy behind the register is having fun! No, seriously! At first he just seemed to be doing some sloppy work, but when I took a closer look it was damn obvious. He was juggling around, and almost making rhymes out of the articles I've decided to purchase.
This guy was doing the whole Coctails-act. As a grocery-store cashier, no less. How awesome is that? I admire and envy anyone being able to enjoy a job like that this much. These kind of guys can't possibly ever be miserable. I was just awed.
As for directories of doom... I am referring to Active Directory and my recent almost, but not quite, super-smooth server upgrade and service-migration. I have never, ever been closer to an almost flawless, zero-impact upgrade, yet that in the last minute when things are just to slip into place, does a 180 and turns it's knuckle of network doom upon you.
My network was bleeding. Everything went down. One of the nice things about Active Directory is that everything is maintained one place, also known as the "No that's never going to happen" single point of failure. I had to use every set of skills I have to mitigate for the fact that I don't really know Active Directory well. 4 hours later, way past midnight, a few dirty hacks put into place, and things seemed to be mostly working.
If it is like they say, that you learn by fucking up, last night was highly educational. I do however feel like I've had my quota for quite a while. That was a intense server, network and general bandaid-the-cancer kinda of operation just to get things to seemingly work.
But I did it. It works. Never mind the few dirty hacks I used here and there to pull it all together. I am now running on a new server, a Dell Poweredge 840, with a dual-core Xeon and bad-ass, high-end server-grade RAID-controller.
So.. I'm happy. It may have taken me slightly more to achieve this than the cashier at the grocery store, but heck. I have a nice server and you can't have it all.