crises!
Last night, work called. “The network is down!” I was dreading the trek in to the office, but I talked someone through restarting the downed server. It went down again, later, and it’s still not clear to me just what happened, but it was annoying. At least I didn’t need to head in.
Today, I started working on some leftover tasks from last week, mostly adding some fields to the production database. Then… crisis! One of our mostly proprietary legacy systems was having trouble, and we had to talk about how to fix it. I think tomorrow will be a lot of plan development.
Just before that call, I’d deployed an updated database front-end, and it was failing. As soon as I got off the phone, I had to fix that. It turned out that Access had decided that, when I added four database fields and a few UI elements, I also should have added OWC, so it added a reference to them for me. In case you’ve never experienced the joy of Office development, OWC are the Office Web Components. WTF?
With those fires out, I headed to 7-11 for my ritual Monday work-from-home lunch. I always get a Red Bull and a Cheeseburger Big Bite, which is like a hamburger pressed into a hot dog shape and injected with bits of cheese. It is gross and delicious. Today, they had one sitting there on the grill, but Matt (the guy at 7-11) said it wasn’t ready to be served. I had an Italian Sausage and Cheese Big Bite. It was good, but… it broke with tradition.
After work, I got to work figuring out why once 150 MB production database had grown to 95 GB. Mostly, it was MSSQL’s traditional love of huge transaction logs. If you’re not careful, it will keep log entries forever, even when your backup routines request a truncation. After truncating 93 gigs of ldf, I wrote a little script to show me all the space usage by the tables in a database. I’ll try to publish it tomorrow. It showed me that our “extra, irregular data” tables were using hundreds of megs. I don’t mind that, really. It shows me that those relations have been a useful addition!
After work, I removed the cable box from our setup and put the TV back on the cable. I was briefly worried that this was a big mistake when I couldn’t get anything to display, but I managed to get everything working. I even eventually found a manual online for our long-unused TV remote. Once I found the remote’s model number under a sticker, it was easy.
See, I’m sending the cable box back to Service Electric and cancelling our Digital Uber Package, which will drop all the channels above 118 and the on-screen guide. This means that we’ll lose VH1 Punk, MTV Drivel, Discovery Ethnic Cleansing, and a few other channels in the form $KnownChannel $SpecialTopic.
The money that had been spend on Stupid Channels and Converter Rental will be redirected to pay for TiVo. Trevor is all juiced up about Microsoft Windows Personal Media Center Personal Media Edition for Media, and is using that instead. He’s selling me his forty hour series two TiVo for cheap. He brought it by when he left work, and we got it set up. Gloria and I spent some time deleting his shows from it, except for West Wing. He had the one episode we’d missed this season! So, we watched that, and then some Law and Order with commercials skipped, then some Modern Marvels. I think I’m going to like TiVo.
Don’t tell my boss. I made fun of him for ages for his zealotry about it.
Meanwhile, Rubric has problems related (mostly) to the fact that everything that encodes entities in XML or HTML turns “ into quot but not ‘ into apos. When passing something from a query parameter into a element attribute, I need to handle things manually. It drives me nuts! I’ll deal with it tomorrow, though. Now it is time to sleep.