Feeling : Refreshed

Boy was I ever ready for the weekend!

It's been another long week filled with upgrades and a few new projects have come along. The one upgrade that caused me some grief was a NetMail upgrade from 3.1 to 3.52. I've done quite a few of these in the test environment and I've never really had any trouble with them. The first one I do in a live environment turns out to be a completely different story. Everything looked like it was ok until we tested it and found out that none of the aliasing worked. After starting the upgrade at 8pm after a 12 hour work day, I finally got it fixed at 4am and got home at 6am. That kinda screwed up my body clock for the rest of the week so I'm glad the weekend finally rolled around and I could get my sleep sorted out.

Thankfully this week should be a little easier, I'm not planning on doing any major upgrades as I'm due to be in Bracknell at Novell UK on Thursday. They're hosting a Technical Services open day. I've been to a couple of these things before and its usually great for pcking up good technical info and meeting other people doing the same work. Usually good for making connections for possible career moves too.

Other than work still not much happening, I've really got to get a life one of these days. I did manage to get out to the football on Saturday. Only the third time I've managed to get up to Old Trafford this season, starting to think that my season ticket might have been a bit of a waste of money. If I'm going to get my moneys worth I'm gonna have to make it to more games. I do wish they'd stop screwing around with the kick-off times. 12:45pm on a Saturday is no time to start a bloody football match. The game wasn't overly great either, even though we got a win. The team never really got going and the crowd was really quiet too. Seems the atmosphere at the ground is really changing, even though it holds 67,000, most of them aren't real fans, just day trippers. Seems like the hardcore of fans that were there in the early 90s have been forced out.

The Carnivale series finale was aired here last week. Didn't explain much though, just made me eager for the start of the second series. I'm thinking that its going to be better than the first, not that the first one wasn't good. Another new series called 4400 has just started on Sky One that I'm wtching as I type this. Its a little strange so far, but it has possibilities. Oh well, I guess I should go and pay more attention to it.

Wow, didn't realise how long it had been since my last entry here. Nothing since before the end of the world series. Speaking of the World Series, that turned out well, as well as it could have for a Cubs fan anyways. Although I thought it could have done with a few more games to at least make it interesting. So if the Red Sox can do it, maybe it will be the Cubs year next year. Then again, we've heard that before. Many times before!

If you hadn't guessed already by the lack of anything new here, I've been pretty bombed out with work. The change of status of NetWare 6 has made the upgrades to 6.5 a higher priority, lots of them to do along with a couple of Zenworks and NetMail upgrades. So much out of hours work I've had to knock my studying on the head for a while. I've put the next exam back a month, no point in a half assed attempt to pass it.

I finally got around to setting up a 2 node cluster using iSCSI in the test lab. A shame it has to be Netware 6.5, it would be useful to be able to do a test upgrade from 5 to 6.5 before trying the real thing. As it is, it looks the cluster upgrade I have to do will be attempted for the first time in a live environment. Keep your fingers crossed :-)

Not much else happening really, all work and no play. I am taking a weekend out a going down to London to see a couple of friends this weekend. It'll be nice to get out of the house for a while, might actually get a couple of good nights sleep in different surroundings. I've been struggling with sleep lately. Can't figure out what's causing it. Monday night I was woke up by nightmares for the first few hours. Not the same nightmare, from the little bits I can remember, there were 3 or 4 different nightmares. I can't remember the last time I had nightmares, was years ago. Touch wood, they haven't recurred since, but I've still been feeling crappy when I was up. Really bad headaches, not feeling rested at all. Hopefully I can catch up on some sleep this weekend, along with a little fun.