neverbeencool

Picture I took about an hour ago while I was walking around over my lunch break.

“Wait a minute,” you say, the wheels turning ever so slowly. “That sign says ‘Portland.’” Exactly.

“But you said you were flying to Texas today.” Yes. Yes, I did.

“And since Portland isn’t in Texas…” Almost there… stay on target… stay on target!

“That means either you stole the sign off the Schnitz and smuggled it past TSA…” Quite possible. After all, they didn’t find the dozen coke-laden Al Qaeda midgets I smuggled in my ass last time I flew…

“Or you aren’t in Texas.”

Brilliant deduction, Holmes boy!

Yes, kids, Our Hero is still here in the Rose City, despite the week of warnings of his imminent departure from the ranks of Northwesterners. Can’t say I’m entirely disappointed to be at home still, especially given the absolutely fantastic spring day the gods bestowed upon us. (Seriously, if you ever wondered why people put up with 9 straight months rain to live up here, it’s for days like this one…. 70ish degrees, no humidity, a light breeze… beautiful.)

Ok, so if you happen to be one of those pathetic souls valued members of society who read blogs on weekends, you probably already know how I spent my weekend. Well, to say that little project didn’t go well would be like saying this guy is just a little gay.

There are a lot of techie details, and they’re all pretty damn boring. Hell, they’d put me to sleep even if I had logged more than the five combined hours of sleep I managed to sneak in over the past two nights.

Gist of it was that we’re moving crap from Server A to Server B in our office in Texas. Doesn’t sound too bad, does it? Copy-and-paste, drag n’ drop, right? Well, not really. Without getting too jargony up in dis bitch, the stuff we were moving was info stored inside a database, so it’s not just a matter of moving stuff around like you would a normal file on your desktop. And just to complicate matters a bit, the two servers are completely different. Different operating systems, different versions of the database software, different versions of the software that uses the database, etc.

Fuck. Just used the words “database,” “software,” and “operating systems” in the same sentence. I don’t know about you, but I kinda want to punch myself now.

Anyway, the first time I tried the move, it failed. Second time, it failed. Third time, it failed differently. And with the amount of data we’re talking about here, each of those attempts can take up to 15 hours before crapping out. Not trivial.

So Sunday night rolled around and shit was still broke-ass. I called my boss at home around 9pm and told him things weren’t looking great, that there was an increasing chance I wouldn’t be finished before my 6am flight the next morning. I’d been actively working on the issues for about 24-36 straight hours at that point, wasn’t getting anywhere with the vendor, and pretty much had no fucking idea how to fix the problems. Spent a lot of time considering a new career in the exciting and rewarding Food Service Industry that night.

In the end, we (I) decided that we’d have to abort everything until I could get it fixed, which meant screwing over the plans for everyone in Texas and postponing my flight down until I could unfuck everything. Sent out an email to the various people involved, letting them know I was going to rollback all the changes I made when I was “fixing it” so they could continue working as normal the next day.

Then I fucked it all up worse.

Again, keeping the boring ass tech shit to myself… When I tried to rollback the aforementioned changes, the recovery failed and took down the entire new server. Thankfully, it’s not in production yet so everyone can still use the current/old one, but it definitely creates more work for me. I’ll have to spend the next two days hammering on this thing just to get it back into the same shape it was in before I started fucking with it.

Then I get to retry that whole failed process that deprived me of my much needed beauty sleep last weekend. If you still wonder why I’d like to get out of the glorious IT field, please feel free to stab yourself in the eye.

And send pictures.

Probably should call a buddy to take them. I’d hate to miss out on the details just because you couldn’t focus with a pen sticking out of your face. Pussy.

Quick sidebar…

I walk under this every day, and I know it’s going to kill me some day:

If you happen to catch a headline that says “Crane in Portland Crushes Beautiful, Divine-Smelling Man” in the near future, just remember how I want to spend my afterlife.