Entries in Life

The life of a Sysadmin happens at two in the morning.

Here I am, tired, in need of sleep, but I'll be sitting here until nine or so this morning — so I can put in a full eight hour day.

Yesterday, our main mail server spontaneously rebooted. I figured something was wrong with it, but I couldn't find anything. So I took a watch-n-wait attitude. It was back up, now we watch-n-wait. The waiting didn't take that long. At fifteen minutes into today, the mail gateway died. I got here at 1:30, made a call to Sun, and swapped in our spare machine. Now the waiting begins.

Just as I finished posting that, the Sun Tech gave me a call and said that they would have to fly the CPU in from Jackson, MS to replace our bad one. It will be here around 10am. Time to go home to bed.

Though, I do wonder who the people are that fly those parts around at odd hours of the night. Some good money in that, I'm sure!

Security is extremely tight for this Super Bowl. As I left work today, I noticed seven military HumVees in front of the CNG Tower (which is right next to the SuperDome). The are hosting a "Media Party" tonight in the mall that shares the building where I work (but who wants to party in the mall?) Chain link fences surround the Dome and they've closed off every street around it, including one highway exit ramp. At night they alternate between lighting the Dome with red, white, and, blue lights and green, yellow and, purple lights (since it is the middle of the Mardi Gras season).

Meanwhile this week in Time, there is a blurb about advertisers avoiding patriotic ads for SuperBowl TV spots because some people found the previous implicit association between patriotism and spending crass. I guess crass patriotism doesn't bother the SuperBowl people, though. They've even covered the chain-link fences that surround the Dome with red, white, and blue bunting.

In 2000, New Orleans did Fish like Seattle did Pigs. Both, of course, were a spinoff of Chicago's Cows.

Anyway, I loved the fish and was going to post some pictures that I took, but it looks like that first link is more complete than anything I could do.