Well, this Friday was a good day. Work was pretty good, even with a
very long conf call. My mad skills at system monitoring came in handy,
as I figured out a quick organization fix for Cacti, and came up with a
'in theory' way under Nagios to alert for processes that A. use 95% of
the CPU, and B. last more than 30 min. And I could do it with the
built in plugins. I've never DIY'd my own Nagios scripts before, but
between my brainmeats and Nagios having good documentation it was a 5
min to have a plan. And since I'm working on a Nagios setup here
at Château Innsmouth, I'll test it over the weekend before testing it more
on the devel and stage networks at work.
I also volunteered to help a fellow Lovecraftian in Hungary with a thesis
he's doing on HP Lovecraft. He had a ebook copy of Joshi's epic 'I Am
Providence', and had about a dozen citations, but he was worried his
committee would argue that the citations didn't match the physical page
numbers (which I've heard of before). So, I have the 1st edition hardbacks,
so he sent me a list of quotations and their chapters and general location,
and I verified the page numbers (which were way different than the ebook).
Didn't take long, maybe 30 min. Felt good to help another adept of
Grandpa Theobald. *gains 2d6% in Library Research*
I've also watched some really bad horror movies. I'll post one of the
reviews later (I did some of my best writing on Facebook ranting about this
flick). I've moved on to 'The Descent', one of my favorites. Ubuntu
released 16.04 yesterday, so I'm updating my test VMs. Tomorrow
is hermit day, with a side of organizing, and possibly a marathon of
the 'Hellraiser' flicks (random idea I had). I've got to move Dagon
and Shoggoth onto the UPSes, as the last power blip showed me I oopsed
there. There will probably also be a labeling fest, along with more
VM updating and the aforementioned Nagios experimenting. Probably will be
other experimenting, I have a list. Sunday is back to normal, laundry
and TV and Amythest time. Then back to work. I have a meeting/lunch
with my recruiter on...Wednesday? I definitely have to give my recruiter
company this, they keep up with their placed minions. I also have a bunch
of work to do, still playing catch up from being sick, and I keep coming
up with ideas on how to do things, that lead to me getting assigned the
deployment of said ideas. But, instead of freaking out (well for long)
I take it as the challenge it's intended as and go with it. So I expect
the next 3 months to be interesting, and not in the Chinese curse sense
of the word.
So that's the most of the state of the fox. I'm still feeling fairly
meh physically. Worst allergies ever. Mood is better, then again given
how low I swung for a while, I kind of have to be better. Looking forward
to a number of book pre-orders and future geeking and well, stuff. Catch
you all later. *waves a tentacle*
My Saturday, besides the sads, has been alright. Started off kind of
rough, with some odd/disturbing dreams. So I got up early, took meds,
and got going.
I built the new
Shoggoth (the mini PC server), got it working with Ubuntu server 16.04 beta,
acting as a DNS, NTP, Apache and file server. It's not powerful, but
it's good enough for what it's going to do. I also build a Windows 10
VM for yucks and giggles. No reason, just cause. Distraction was a good
plan for today.
I also watched a lot of Scifi. Star Wars VII, some assorted monster flicks,
Robocop, the Martian (which was still a lot of feels, oops), and currently
Hollow Man. Lots of sciencing the shit out of things, both good and bad
*wink*
Tomorrow I'm still going to take it easy-ish, with some chores and
laudnry to do. Not a lot though, as I doubt I'll be back to myself.
Still feeling kind of sick, better, but still sick. This really sucks.
Really wish I was feeling better already. Hopefully tomorrow I will be.
As for the landmine day, well it's been as good as could be expected.
Some tears here and there, but no real meltdowns. Which is good.
Hopefully since the day is done, my mood will start climbing back up,
and life can get back to normal. I can hope at least.
Still sick, called in yet again. *sigh* This is so unbueno, not only
leaving Carcosa Corp in a lurch, but boy is it expensive to be sick before
your PTO kicks in. But after I decided to pick up the clutter at
Château Innsmouth and I got kind of woozy, I decided that staying home
was probably the better plan. I read a bit, napped a bit, watched assorted
horror movies. Been going for favorites for a while, first 'The Zero Boys'
aka the slasher film no one has seen, which is probably a good thing, it's
not very good. But it has some epic one liners, and Kelli Maroney in
full on sass mode, and it has a special place in my horror movie heart.
Now I'm watching 'Evil Dead II', aka my favorite movie in history, at least
for the number of times I've seen it. Probably will throw on another
favorite from my younger days afterwards. Not done much else besides
binge on bad movies, and update virtual machines.
Tomorrow is the landmine day. I had a series of plans depending on mood,
but due to being sick, I've decided I'm just going to stay home and geek.
I bought a cheap barebones microPC, aka insert ram and drive and go, and I'm
going to set it up as a home server. Don't need it, I can do everything
via VMs, but I wanted a server to play with, and oldDagon eats a lot of
power. So mini it is. I'm also planning on watching favorite sci-fi
flicks. Monsters and aliens and such. See how well I can distract myself.
Of course, as I've said to my local friends, if things get too bad, I will
pick up the phone. I promise. But the general plan is to just hermit,
and take care of me. I have food, I have drinks, I have books and plush
critters, and the internet. Some of my favorite people live on the interwebs.
So I'll be ok, Promise.
So yeah, still sick, still frazzled. But I will survive. Going to get
back to 'Evil Dead II' and chill. Catch you all tomorrow, when I'm sure
I'll be talkative.
Went to the doc in a box today. It's not strep, it's probably just allergies out of the wazzo. Got a script for steroids to clear up all the bits that are freaking over allegins, and a script for antibiotics if it doesn't pass in a couple of days. Dropped off scripts, came home, feeling pretty lousy and sad all of a sudden. Sick of feeling sick. Oh well, it will pass eventually. Nothing much else to say, catch you all later.
It's Friday. Not doing my best this last week. The anniversary of Mom's
passing is a week from Saturday, and it's pretty hard coping at the moment.
Work is work, I found out I was doing something wrong, and now I have to
do a lot of catch up. Kind of frustrating, but that's life.
Tomorrow is a shindig for Nymaz's spawning day. Bad movies and friends.
I'm also helping him with some fence repair before hand. I also need to
find time to go to the store. Sunday is seeing the sequel to 'Olympus
has Fallen' with Amythest and maybe Nymaz. Lots of social time. Which is a
tad challenging, but I've got tonight, and I'm going to do my best to be
social. I'm trying to be more than my anxieties.
On the more positive front, I finally upgraded Pseudopod. Not the latest
and greatest, but I got a refurbed Nexus 5. Double the disk space, and
new shiny and latest android. Still loading stuff on it, adding apps,
etc. Yay shiny. Not sure of a name for it yet, letting things
swirl in the depths of my brain. It might just be Pseudopod 3.0. We'll
see.
Btw, if you haven't read
Doug Wynne and you like Spies and Shoggoths ala DELTA GREEN or The
Laundry, you should fix this. I recently reread 'Red Equinox', and it's
turning into one of my comfort reads. (and if you were wondering where
the LJ icon came from, well you can guess).
Ok, that's enough rambling for right now. Catch you all later. *tentacle
wave*
Had a weird day, started to write out a long post about it, deleted it
due to well, weirdness. Going into work early tomorrow to field support
issues post migration tonight, since I can't stay late to help with said
migration (contract worker problems). Kind of stressed due to the anxiety
I get about having to be up earlier than usual. Wanna stress out a fox,
give him an early task.
Otherwise, glad tomorrow is Friday. Glad the weekend has little in the
way of 'must do'. Some computer foo, some adulting, hopefully a lot
of decent sleep, bad movies, and good books. Ahh, this is much more positive
post. So I think I'll call it. Ciao!
Spent last night watching 'Kingdom of Heaven' and then reading a random
book on the Templars. Well, the first 1/4 of the book was about the lead
up to the Crusades, going as far back as the first human settlements in
the area around Jerusalem. Which on one hand really makes sure everyone
is on the same page, but on the other hand wow that's a big lack of knights
in red crosses. Still it's a good read. Went to sleep, had weird
dreams about being some kind of guard/warrior from somewhere in the time
period I was reading about (that's a lot of ground, but there wasn't
much to date things by), except we were going to what looked like a modern
grocery store. Not a clue what that means.
Woke up, checked on running scripts on Dagon. Started watching '300: Rise
of an Empire' because I was in an Eva Green mood. Went to the store,
got most of a week's worth of groceries. Came home, started laundry, been
watching 'Prince of Darkness' because well, it's Easter. *chuckle* Think
I'm going to watch 'The Omen' next, since I've been enjoying 'Damien' on TV.
Happy little heretic here *wink*
Mostly done with the upgrade, all the VMs are migrated, updating the
last of them now. Still working on the backup of the big data drive.
Need to pause it when it gets to backing up the VMs because that's still
being updated. I have a small laundry list of things to fix/update, but
I have time.
That's about it for today, going to veg out, put up laundry, make something
for dinner and sack out I think. Catch you all later *waves a tentacle*
Another week has passed. Been a kind of crazy week, note to future me,
taking melatonin, even when the pshrink says to, leads to a weird mess
of brainmeats. At least on my current med cocktail. Work was also
stressful, changes in how my group does things, and our manager was in
town. Note, bossman isn't a bad guy, but he's remote most of the time so
it was odd working with him there. I think it was odder for my cohorts
than for me. Things worked out ok, and today was me fixing a bunch of
stuff for the developers. Useful fox was useful. Felt good to be the
fixit guy today.
After work I came home, decided to put on 'Excalibur'. I love this movie,
but I've avoided it for years because the battle music is "O Fortuna" from
"Carmina Burana", which I used as my work ring tone. Got to the point
when hearing the start would trigger anxiety. Well, 6 months to the day
of leaving The Shoggoth Pit, I'm offically able to at least listen to the
bits in this movie. Yay!
Not much else. I started to write a long 'State of the Fox' but then
I remembered I did it last week, and nothing much has changed. New Linux
box soon, hopefully a fun restful weekend. Ok, I'll catch you all later.
Ciao.
And it's Friday. Was a very long week, but a good one. Trying to finish
up my 'install cacti and nagios on everything'. And I am jinxed, I added
so many entries to cacti, that the VM hosting it started having CPU issues.
So I disabled a bunch of the new additions to keep the load from spiking.
We're going to upgrade the VM, but didn't get to do it today. I also
broke my first biggish thing today. The developers run their own
nagios server, for...reasons. I added their nagios to the master
nagios server that IT runs, and in the process broke how their nagios server
worked. Was an easy fix, and the developer who reported it was cool.
(so was a certain A person who helped me reinstall the missing plugins)
Again, I like this job.
Came home after work with takeout. Allergies are acting up again, stupid
Texas weather. Been watching horror movies starring actresses I find
attractive. Picked up a touch, did dishes, but really haven't been
motivated to do much more than catch up on twitter/facebook and update
software that I install from source. Oh yeah, and balance the checkbook.
Oy. Plans for tomorrow is to catch up on assorted chores, and do adulting
things like my taxes and double check the insurance provided by the staffing
company. There will also be general down time and relaxing. Sunday, I'm
planning to go see 'Gods of Egypt' (insert laughter here) with Amythest
and Nymaz. I know it will be painfully bad in a historical/mythological
sense, but it should be entertaining. (I enjoyed 'Troy') Should be
a good, relaxing weekend.
So yeah, I'm doing pretty job. New job is still good, home is comfy,
and I have epic numbers of books to read.
