"Ah, but I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now."
My Boog Pages
Monday, September 5
It Takes A Bitter Man To Sing A Bitter Song
Well, I was going to write a long post about how bitter I was at missing Bouchercon and how lucky all the bastards who made it were. But you know what? I had a great weekend. The zoo on Saturday - hot, but we had the place to ourselves - then a cookout yesterday, and a long visit with my wife's new friend Donna, who has seen much in her years and is a natural storyteller.
Also: bought a microphone for the computer. I wasn't expecting much, I just wanted something to work with the new game Battlefield 2, which has a voice-based command and control structure, but the sound was much cleaner than expected, so much so that I may try recording a couple of stories to MP3 with it. We shall see.
Supergraham. I did something so good at work on Wednesday that, had I done nothing else all day, I still would have earned my pay. And that wasn't all I accomplished.
We were on a conference call with our disaster recovery site vendor (hint: they're big and blue) when something that the coordinator said struck me funny. Background: Our normal site is a few miles outside of New York city, and all the backup network connections from vendors such as Equifax, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, etc., all come to there. This year we'll be at a site in Colorado, and all of those connections will be trunked over the DR vendor's net.
There will be a number of networks in Colorado, all of which will need to speak to each other. In particular, our backup server is on a different network than most of our other servers, so several gigabytes of data will have to pass between them.
So when the coordinator for Big 'N Blue said something about our AS/400 being trunked to New York, I was moved to ask if all network traffic between networks would have to go there.
And they said it would. Several gigabytes, making a round trip across a wide-area network. We'd be lucky to finish in a year. I guess they are used to doing whatever crazy things their customers want, so they're conditioned not to ask questions, but really, this flunked the "common sense" test.
It's all worked out now, but our team lead sent me major kudos via email, and copied my boss, so I got to spend at least one day as a superhero.
