Bump in the Night

Woke up at 4:00 this morning to a ticking sound. "What the hell is that?" I asked myself. Since I didn't answer, I got up to investigate. Turned out the (brand new) furnace had sprung a leak. Water dripped onto the electronic control, causing it to short circuit & go into overdrive. The ticking sound was steam percolating through the radiators. This was not a good thing. Neither was the small lake forming in the middle of my house.

Cut the power, called the service company, listened to the horible rumbling as the pressure relief valve let go, blah blah blah, yadda yadda yadda.

All better now. Thank god for lifetime warranties.

Dry Spell

Haven't had sex since December 12, which was 43 days ago. Wonder how long this will go on for.

Auto maintanence

My elders always said I should keep a log of any service done on my car, so I guess I'll try.

Two new tires on the F150 (fron wheels). Price: $185. Miles: 195,000. Drives a lot better now.

Other recent items:
Water pump on the Taurus. Price: Couple hundred. Miles: 90,000.
Wheel bearing and related items on the F150. front right wheel. Price: $700 (ouch!). Miles: 194,000 or thereabouts.

Some good things

1) My sister paid me the money she borrowed four years ago. I asked for it & she said no problem and mailed me a check. Good for her.

2) Steelers are in the playoffs, after a 15-1 season. Today they play the Jets, whom they beat earlier in the season. Good for them.

3) The Short One and I have joined a fencing club. We exercise, we have fun, we get to hit people with swords. Good for us.

Out of the Frying Pan...

They finally got the down cluster running yesterday. Once that was all okay, we
stopped all the jobs running on the other cluster for some minor
upgrades to the queueing system. At 1:30 everything was looking good &
the sysadmin said he just needed to change a few scripts and reboot and
then we could start using it again.

Ha.

It is now 5:00 and it is showing no signs of coming back to life.
You can't win.

To make my breakfast complete, a herd of clients are zooming over for meetings tomorrow. So I can pretty much kiss my productivity goodbye for the day.

Dead Dead Dead

The bigger of our two linux clusters went down last week. The problem appears to be a bad CPU on the control workstation. Turns out that for IBM both the Friday before Jan 1 and the Monday after were both holidays, so the earliest they could get a technician out here was today, five days after it went down. Meanwhile, no jobs running. Very expensive for us.

We, of course, did not get either Friday or Monday off.

Maybe I should go work for IBM.

The good news is that my new workstation stepped up to the plate. Running both CPUs, I can get nearly the same performance as I was getting with 4 CPUs on the cluster. I won't even mention how much faster it is than the old unix box...