Flashes of Panic

I could probably just post a “now playing” instead—Hammering In My Head comes to mind, for example.

After my suggestion that I’d be happier if I stopped doing work-stuff outside of work, I got email from my mother yesterday afternoon asking if I could help out a bit with the website for the Family Business, which I guess is somebody’s way of telling me never to say never. More on this later, perhaps. There’s certainly more to be said.

Something has gone awry in the file server the Production department uses, which ground them to a standstill this morning.

Production has traditionally run their own IT show, since the rest of the building had traditionally just bought Wintel boxes at random and plugged them in. (I was hired to do website and CD-ROM production, with IT as an afterthought, but I’m pretty bad at doing things halfway.) Production, consequently, has their own file server, until recently their own fast segment of the network (we’re all fast, now,) their own backup system, their own network printers, etc. And for pragmatic and political reasons, I’ve left them alone with that for the most part—if they don’t need my help, they don’t need my help. I’ve got plenty to keep me busy with getting everyone else’s collective IT act together, plus the other stuff I do.

So today I got to troubleshoot a server I’d not previously looked at for more than a minute at a time. Which is running an operating system I haven’t used regularly for about two years. I got everyone connected and working again, but it’s a kludgy workaround connection which doesn’t solve the real problem with the server, which I still don’t understand. I am honestly longing for Production to move to OS X. If I worked with them more regularly, and understood what they really need their machines to do, I could have had them ready back in the winter, after the big general book shipped but before they got swamped with this spring’s projects, but anyway.

I thought I’d fill the rest of the afternoon with a quick fix on the registration database for one of our software authors (providing differently-formatted views) but instead I broke it so even the previous default view doesn’t work.

I am considering hiking up Bare Mountain after work, looking for a cache I’m not sure is actually there, but given my record so far today, that might be a bad plan.

Now playing: Chromium from After Everything Now This by The Church

Update: Having whined, the registration database turned out to be an easy fix. I had to get my loops in order.