News from Carcosa

I've posted this on my LJ and other social media, but I can't forget my trusty Deep One blog. A little over 2 weeks ago my boss at Carcosa Corp called me to give me the news, they were going to make me an offer to come on perm where I am. Same duties for the most part, with the addition of being oncall and being responsive to alerts and work outside of core hours. Well today I had a call with the HR rep. Long story short, I accepted the offer. 19 PTO days a year, good benefits, and both a title change (adding a 'Senior' to my title) and the money that goes with it. Went and did the drug screen and filled out the info for my background check. If everything goes according to plan, I'll come on board on December 12th. So happy. So is everyone I work with, I seem to be a popular fellow there. So yeah, things are going swimmingly. Now if only Carcosa Corp would open an office in Innsmouth, I'd be set. *wink*

Patching servers and stress

Well this week has been iffy. I slept for crap all last weekend, so come Monday I gave into the voices in my head and called in. And mostly spent the day sleeping or napping. I ended up making up the time this week, including a 15 hour day on Thursday for 4th quarter patch fest.

In Vulpinese, I'm what I call a burst worker. I rather do a large task in one shot, rather than break it up over multiple days. So even though we had today and yesterday to patch all the dev and stage servers, I wanted to it all on Thursday. But between working around the QA folks and developers, I was behind by the time it was after working hours. Worked from 08:30 to 23:30, and by the end I was loopy enough that I was making mistakes. And I still have a number of servers to work on, and I had a dev environment of many databases to get online. My original fix no longer brings the databases up correctly, and I was too fried to figure out the hunt and peck fix I did months ago. So I tried shutting it all down, and running them back up even slower to prevent race conditions...but it didn't work as I came in with a number of stacks still offline. I also came into some dorked hosts. Yeah, I was having flashbacks to the Shoggoth Pit when I'd walk in after an extended shift to even more work.

We fixed the hosts, and I manually got the dev enthronement back online. Discussed the issues with my boss, and I think we have a better idea of time frames and scheduling. It will require more late nights, patching dev one night, and the two stage environments on separate nights, or at least making QC and Dev only work on one environment while the other is patched.

(interruption for the non geek. We run three environments. Development, where our dev group code stuff. Stage is where things are tested in as close to a clone of our production environment, which is what the customers talk to day to day. Aka, don't touch prod until state has been tested like crazy. Lesson ends)

Speaking of production, we won't be updating that til next Sunday evening. I'm hoping I'll be working with the other admins on my team for that one, so it's not so rushed. And speaking of Sunday, I'm going back into work this Sunday for that last 4 servers I couldn't do today for reasons. Any time I work on Sunday will equal leaving early next week.

So yeah, today has not been the most fun. I was exhausted, stressed, and down on myself. On the plus side, no one was unprofessional or rude, far from it. Also, my fellow admins went out of their way to remind me they are really glad I work with them, and that I do a good job. Which I did really need to hear.

Came home a while ago, I'm majorly dragging. Watching 'Event Horizon' because I needed horror in space. I'm also thinking of watching 'Prometheus' because I enjoy it, and because no matter how bad you feel, you're probably smarter than the scientists on that ship. Tomorrow I'm going to see 'Doctor Strange'. Oh and hopefully sleep in.

The short answer, I am tired as hell, I'm kind of frazzled, but I'll be ok. I have books, I have movies, and all will be well. Night all.