People may have noticed me being slightly frazzled this week. Let’s briedly investigate why.
At work, I have been involved in two large projects. The first has been the deployment of 135 new dual 2.5 GHz G5s for workstations in the college computer labs (and the administration thereof). The other has been to master the hardware that we are going to be using to capture lectures to send to our school in Qatar.
Both of these projects need to be completed by the start of the semester, preferably before the students get here on the 24th. This means that this week was to be the last solid week we could get in to work on things.
So on Monday, I find that the imaging process we were doing over the weekend had failed. While we’re in the middle of fixing this, there’s a fire. Construction crews in one of the courtyards blew up a transformer. No one was hurt, but we had to emergency shutdown everything so the power could be shut off.
Tuesday, everything breaks. Bringing the servers back up is always bumpy, and a number of things we had done were just flat out not working. I left work seriously depressed, around 7.
Wednesday, inroads were made, and my impression was that things were fixed.
Thursday, everything has broken itself again overnight. Apple engineers admit that there is an issue with the 10.3 server feature we’re trying to use. We’re starting to talk about contingency plans for what features we can drop if we need to shoot lower. Also, someone discovers signifcant problems with our encoding units for the lecture capture. An engineer is called in for Friday.
Friday, in a magnificent hack, I work around almost all of the remaining Apple issues. The engineer arrives and we patch up the encoders, but we still have to do more debugging Monday because some signs are still showing up.
All in all, its been more work hours than I’ve ever put in at a job before. My body is in horrible shape – I have been in physical pain of various forms all week.
We are headed to Ithaca for the weekend. I’m actually typing this from JFK, Joi Ito style. I’ll be back home tomorrow night.
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