6 posts tagged “6a”
So, I like Mondays.
Yes, I threw that out there. I think Monday may be my favorite day of the week. I know, it's backwards. "Dude, Junior likes Mondays. What the hell is up with that?" I'll tell you.
Monday is the beginning of hope. You've spent the weekend relaxing, refreshing, getting your mind off of work, thinking about other things. (In general. On those weekends when Mogile gets nailed or someone exploits a security hole or something... not so relaxing. But those aside!)
For me, after that relaxation and whatever, I'm ready to get back to work. I'm ready to throw my mind back into whatever my task is. Solve those problems that were vexing me on Friday, and make some forward progress on things. I'm ready and raring to go!
This generally lasts until I get slammed with meetings. (It seems to be a management favorite that Monday = meetings!) However! Since I'm in a weird position right now with work, I have no scheduled meetings, and only meet when I need to exchange information to do my task. Hell yeah!
I've got the perfect thing going on now. Seriously. I like this sort of being. Not having to check in with somebody every second of the day, just working on what needs to be done. It frees me up to plan my day around my productivity levels, and not around arbitrary blocks of time for the exchange of information. (I should write a book about meetings, and become rich.)
So I'm going to get back to work now. Huzzah.
Current mood: happy
Current drink: Coca-Cola
Current music: Overture by Andrew Lloyd Webber (The Phantom of the Opera Soundtrack)
Current project: MogileFS improvements/refactoring
Current lighting: perfect! somehow the lights are on today.
I absolutely love distributed systems. I love the fact that I just switched the active database from one machine to another, and you didn't see a thing. It's just cool. It's certainly not unique to Six Apart, but it's just something I think is neat.
Not much else to report now. Spent the day engineering backup stuff, or rather, reworking it so that it can be ported to work on Vox from LJ. Had to change and tweak a bunch of things, and then test it out the wazoo. Still lots to do though.
Got some tasty sushi on the way though. That will definitely make this evening episode that much brighter. Heeeeeck yeah!
But in reality, it's a good night. I vastly prefer working at night than I do in the day. Less interruptions, less noise, and my brain doesn't really seem to get going until I've been awake for some number of hours anyway.
Enough rambling, time to work!
The subject says it all. The Shuttle I'm using here is relatively old, it was bought about three years ago before I got to Danga. I've been using it ever since. Originally it had only the built in integrated video, 512MB RAM, 40GB hard drive, and a Celeron 2.5GHz processor.
Over the years, I've slowly upgraded her. First I stuck in a second video card (1996 Matrox Millenium... whoo-boy, it's slow, but at least it does 1280x1024) and then later I bought an extra 512MB RAM to boost it to a gig. Finally, today, I broke down and upgraded the video card again. GeForce 6200 with 128MB of video ram.
The display is now much faster and the CPU isn't as loaded when the system is redrawing on the screen. It's kinda nice to be able to scroll without seeing 100% CPU. Granted, it still seems to have problems moving the Flash around when it's paging... hm. Questions for another day, I guess.
Next upgrade: bigger hard drive, and need to try to get a better processor. Celerons are horrid. And perhaps get more RAM, but eh, 1GB is probably fine... it makes Xen a bit tight, but I'm not running Xen right now. Probably not going to either, as VMware is more flexible for what I want to do. Just need to fix that disk space problem above, see...
Really, the point of this post is just to post. Because I need to update this thing, yeah, that's it. Next stop: real work. Ahhh yeahz.
Why is gnome-terminal so awfully slow? This piece of software has been around for so incredibly long, you'd think they would have improved the speed somewhat.
All I want is a terminal application that provides me with tabs, without all the fancy functionality. I don't care about transparency, Unicode, or ... whatever else gnome-terminal does. I just want to have one window with named tabs. Is that so hard to get?
Further, X has crashed twice today. Just out of the blue -- pop! -- restart, hello login screen. This is rather frustrating. I think this machine is about to bite the big one. (That might explain why one monitor has gone fuzzy, too.)
I think it's time to look into the corporate equipment replacement plan.
Well, back to work.