Dale Miller

I spent much of yesterday dealing with mail. The mail queue problems reached epic proportions, with delays of up to four hours. As the campus reacted, so did my boss (yes, we are reactive, not proactive). Since neither I nor the vendor could find anything wrong with the box itself, we started looking at environment. Just as an experiment, Tim and I decided to trying moving one of the Barracudas from behind the F5 load balancer to the firewalled subnet where the mail system lives. That implied some DNS changes, and the accompanying wait while changes propagate. It seems to be doing the trick. The one we moved is not experiencing the processing delays. We still don’t know what the problem was, only that we seem to have fixed it. The best guess is that the F5 boxen don’t do well as general-purpose routers and that outbound communication was suffering as a result. We shall see how things work today.

In a slightly-related topic — as Tim and I were headed out of the office to move the Barracuda, I ran into Joleen, which always brightens my day. I suspect that was partial inspiration for my dream this morning, incoherent though it was.

I was at a party at Debra’s house, which was near the campus (a house completely unlike hers or any I remember). I ran into Joleen there and joined her and a group of others to walk afterward to a nearby Burger King (that also doesn’t exist), where we had sushi (yes, a sushi bar at B.K. — it’s a dream, alright?) and then I walked her back to her dorm in the rain. At that point I realized I had left my camera at Debra’s, and everything fragmented.

That was about it, but it’s unusual enough for me to remember *anything* from my dreams, I decided to write it down.

Today was full of minor annoyances. when I was taking a shower, the water started pulsing. I’m afraid my pressure regulator may be acting up again. I only hope it’s as easy to fix as last time. Then I left the house wearing a short-sleeved shirt only to realize it was 40° and my jacket was at the office. Not a big deal, I don’t have far to walk. I got to work, walked to the office, and realized that I didn’t have my keys. A walk back to the car confirmed my suspicions — I had locked the keys in the car. Alright, I can deal with that later. I got one of the help desk people to let me in, and found out that the office had no heat. Grrr… I put on my jacket and started up my desktop machine only to discover that one of our mail filtering systems had decided to go bonkers overnight. We had roughly 40,000 messages queued up when I came in. I called support and waited. By 8:30 it was up to 80,000 messages queued. Even though both systems were back online by 9:00, mail never caught up all day. Next I headed over to dance class to discover that my instructor was ill. Fortunately I found this out *before* I changed clothes. I took that opportunity to call Public Safety and ask to have them try to open my car. I then stood around in the deck for half an hour waiting on the officer. He would have been there sooner if the dispatcher had correctly told him where I was. Ah well, at least he opened my car and solved that problem.

So, nothing all day was really *bad*, but it qualifies as “one of those days”.

Oh, I am rebuilding the cluster on the mail filters tonight. You have to love software vendor that can produce a message reading:

 Running Tasks:
  Clustering
Adding to cluster: -6257 % - Synchronizing user settings.

A negative percentage done would be bad enough, but one totally out of range? Welcome to my world.

So apparently my problem last night was just exhaustion. I guess after the energy of rehearsal gave way, by body decided to shut down. When I hit the bed I was immediately asleep, and didn’t want to get up this morning. I’m still tired, but feel *much* better than last night. I can see that my weekend is going to contain a number of hours of simple rest.

I had a pretty good day at work today. I accomplished things, didn’t have too many frustrations, and generally was pleased. I went to choir this evening, and enjoyed the rehearsal. So why, when I was driving home, did I start to feel depressed? It’s quite annoying to go from a fairly long stretch of being on an even keel to suddenly feeling down. Maybe it’s because I need sleep. Maybe it’s just the drive home. I don’t know, but I want to be back to normal in the morning.

I didn’t want to get out of bed this morning. It would have been a lovely morning to sleep in, but I was good and came to work. It’s probably bad that the main reason I did so is so I wouldn’t miss dance class. Most everything that I’m doing at work today could have waited until tomorrow. But… I’m here, so I shall try to be productive. Oh, I guess that means I shouldn’t be writing journal entries — oops.

We did some serious work in dance class today. I don’t usually end up panting for breath, but we also don’t usually run as fast as possible back and forth across the floor several times. We were “exploring space”. It was a fun class, and far more improvisation than we have done in the past. I’m looking forward to seeing where we will go with that aspect. If I get nothing else out of this semester, I will be more flexible, and generally in better shape.

I was both good and bad today. Since the weather was lovely in central Arkansas, I decided to go climb Pinnacle. I did my usual two passes up and down, although somewhat slower than usual. Then, in a manner determined to undo all the good I had just done, called Domino’s and ordered a pizza and Cinnasticks. Yes, I know they are far too many calories, but they’re just so darned good.

I’ve been spending much of my time recently messing with Asterisk servers and SIP connections, and digging myself deeper into the Sun Identity Manager product. Both are entertaining. Part of this weekend, however, I have been trying to teach myself the rudiments of Labanotation.

I took Ashley to the vet on Saturday, and her ears are much better. It is nice to be able to stop putting in ear drops. She didn’t like that very much.

I was having a pretty good day today, despite showing up at the office to find the whole building at about 40°F. I accomplished a few useful things at the office, headed out after work to get a second key for my car, and dropped by Savers on the way home. Things were good up until I stopped for a sandwich. I ate and the walked back out to the car to find a crease in the right front fender. It looks like the typical SUV bumper crease that I have had on at least two occasions before. People shouldn’t drive those things if they cant park them! I don’t know when it happened, since I don’t normally look at that fender. It had to have been in the last two days, though, since it certainly wasn’t there when I left the house on Sunday.

I don’t know whether to report it insurance, or just have it fixed. I really don’t want to submit another claim so soon. That really didn’t make my night.

In an unusual fit of common sense, I elected to stay home from work today. Apparently streets in Little Rock were mostly clear, but up here on the mountain things were still rather white. I took an impromptu vacation day today so I wouldn’t need to drive on the ice and snow. Sometime mid-afternoon my car was clear and my driveway mostly snow-free. A few more hours will probably clear it off, but tonight it’s supposed to drop to 18°. With any luck tomorrow will see the roads clear. It’s not like I have anything I really need to do outside the house, I just don’t like being forced to stay home.

UALR has cancelled day classes, which means I don’t have to drive on snow. Unfortunately that means that I miss a day of dance class.

The decision for night classes has not yet been made. I’m assuming that the Community Chorus will meet if night classes are being held. I don’t expect anywhere near a full turnout if that happens, and I don’t know if I will make it. Time will tell.