This Would be Useful this Evening

I've meant to link to Drinking Liberally for a while--it'd be nice if something like this was available in Louisiana, even though the logical location would be New Orleans--or Lafayette. Which would require travel by automobile--not a good thing if you've been drinking.

On the other hand, there are plenty of hotels in NOLA, and Lafayette is just up the street from the family homestead in New Siberia. Friday or Saturday evening--early enough to allow for additional night life--could be an option. If anyone's interested, let me know. And, there's always Red Stick if anyone wants to turn Drinking Liberally into a charity case...ok, that's not entirely fair, but right now my favorite local spot for that kind of event is undergoing renovations.

Today's drinking excuse is derived, of course, from work. To be fair, I actually learned quite a bit today, and in such a way that will probably stick with me...but pounding your head and/or fist into a wall is never much fun.

Without trying to bore anyone with the details, I'll simply note that, in the course of discovering that I WASN'T entirely out of my head, I managed to speak to gold, silver, AND platinum tech support in the course of a three and a half hour call that determined the problem was a defective part known as the backplane. Tomorrow, a tech will arrive to replace the offending part, and I'll have another go at setting up/installing a new server, and external JBOD.

JBOD is technicalese for "Just a Bunch Of Disks." That's exactly what they are--14 disks, each roughly 150Gb in size. The unit they're a part of will eventually be configured in such a way that the computer thinks it's one BIG disk (that's my job). This morning I spent a couple of hours going through everything I could think of before calling into technical support...at least I didn't miss something glaringly obvious.

Will catch up on other, more important stuff--more in a bit.

Oh, off topic, but...a friend recently loaned me Life of Pi. I started it Sunday evening and finished it last night--that is, for the first time. I'll be reading it again, and can recommend it highly.