I Never Could Get the Hang of Thursdays

There are worse things than Installing software on a virtual environment. For example, installing software on a virtual server which is 10,000 miles away and has ping times of around 200ms. And that's not so bad when compared to having to do that install via a secondary virtualisation through something like VLC.

At 7pm I should have a bottle of vodka in my paws. I had two mice.
At 9pm I should have a bottle of vodka in my paws. I had two mice.
At 11pm I should have a bottle of vodka in my paws. I had two mice.
At 1am I should have an empty bottle of vodka in my paws. I had two mice and a trackball.

I hate Citrix.

The only highlight of the evening was stumbling across Voice of the Hive, an utterly fascinating read which kept me occupied while waiting for Citrix to write some 430,000 Registry entries it seems to need.

I arrived home to find that yet another one of the precious few activities which bring me any sort of joy in life is won't be available for the next couple weeks. She'd been to a dentist and had had to undergo painful surgery on her jaw. The fuck had given her no pain meds, just some ibuprofen. I managed to find one Parkodín tablet, the last scrap of serious pain medication in the Doghouse. Although only 10mg of codeine, it was enough to let her fall asleep.

I switched on my game/PhotoShop computer (mucho memory, high-end video card) to play some GTA:SA and heard a clock ticking. There's no clock in the computer room; it was the game machine's main drive which has a 250g of games, applications, filters and scripts, all of which I get to reinstall this weekend.

x-posted from HuSi, where there's a bee poll.

Red, Red Whine

Dinner last night was Vispannetjes, a Flemish fish stew cooked for me as I worked on rebuilding my network, the phone and DSL having finally been switched on Tuesday evening. Only a month late: not bad for Germany. I no longer have to borrow my neighbour's unsecured wireless network which has connect speeds indicative of a Hayes Accura 33.6 Modem.

Made with salmon and pollock in a creamy sauce with mushrooms and cheese, it was quite tasty. It's also made with red wine. I don't have "cooking wine" at home because I won't cook with any wine I wouldn't drink, and there are enough cheap yet drinkable wines which are fine for cooking and only cost a few euros a bottle. Baron Philippe de Rothschild Mouton Cadet Bordeaux is not one of these. Running around €40-100 a bottle this is stuff you drink slowly and enjoy. You can cook with it, but unless your name is J. P. Moneybags, you probably won't... unless you happen to be my girlfriend.

The wine she served with dinner? Five-euro-a-bottle merlot. The stuff I got for cooking. Because then we'd be drinking the same wine all evening.

I think my girlfriend's fraternal twin Clancy works for $BigEasternTelco.

Hi, we have a serious performance problem after upgrading our production system from version 2.2.a to 3.4.c.12. Everything works perfectly in our test environment but once we rolled out to Production the system slows to a crawl and starts hanging and requires restarting.

The system logs looked fine. The database was under a bit of a load at times but that's nothing out of the ordinary. Strange that the load drops in a short time though... I asked for -- and received -- fully verbose system logs and checked them again. Things looked normal until people started logging in.

I asked for the OS performance logs. The CPUs were all pinning at 100% in a short time. Yeah, that could do it. But Clancy said everything ran sweet when they'd put double the standard user load on the Test system which comprised two brand new, dual quad-core 3GHz Xeons with 16GB of memory. Hmm... and what's the Production system running on?

Four boxes, each running a single 500MHz PIII Xeon with 1GB of memory.

Fuckwits.
x-posted from HuSi, where there's a poll.