I took about a month of from writing in here. For those few of you who read this and are interested in keeping up, my apologies. I kind of had a bad snap there with a bunch of things happening at once including another big trip to work out at the power plant. Those trips are brutal – 6 and 7 day work-weeks pulling 15+ hour days.

I also was struggling with the loss of some of my relatives as well as my own personal issues and struggles with death. I am going to be 40 next year. I always wondered if I would have a mid-life "crisis" and I think that in some ways it’s already started. It’s been hard for me to not think about that, but I seem to be getting back to normal.

Since my friend and co-worker quit, I’ve also had to carry his workload and as luck would have it all of our project s are hitting at the same time. To top it off, we also have a lot of customer requests hitting and while they sat there for weeks or months not ready for us to work on their projects they are suddenly all ready. I just can’t keep up.

But!!! I did get a new laptop and it’s pretty sweet. It’s a Dell Studio XPS 16 and it’s totally loaded with features and whizmos!!! Unfortunately, it took me almost three days to totally wipe it out, re-install it the base OS and move all of my files over to it. Why did it take three days? See above – I’ve had NO time to work on it. Last night I stayed up until about midnight so I’d be ready for the work day today. There is nothing like being in the middle of two laptops and you can’t really quite use either one.

As usual, when I don’t write, I’ve had a lot of thoughts and ideas to write about but simply did not feel like getting to it.

However, you might find this interesting –
We have a few systems that monitor client networks. This is a service we provide to them. Last Thursday one of the monitoring systems freaked out and sent out, oh, maybe 1000+ alerts. These alerts come to my inbox in the form of an email. This same email also goes to our trouble ticket system and opens a trouble ticket. When a trouble ticket hits the system, I also get an email.

So right now, that means I am getting at least two emails for each alert – and as I said there was well over 1000 of them.

The initial email was also supposed to go to an old email address for a guy that used to work for us. Let’s say his name was Fred. Our email administrator had just killed his email account. So all mails that were supposed to go to Fred were getting rejected by the email server. The email server would send a notification of the reject out to the ticketing system – generating more tickets, and thus more alert emails to our in-boxes.

So now, figure for each alert I am getting three email – that’s over 3000+ emails. Then, the coup de grace… if a trouble ticket is opened for more than about 15 minutes, it sends and alert to my phone, and then it sends another one 10 minutes later if nobody responds. My phone was hit with god knows how many text messges. It had to be in the thousands. It basically crippled my phone. I had to mute the phone because I was getting a text message on the average of about one every one-to-two seconds. So if people called me I couldn’t tell. When I would try to call out I had to wrestle with the phone since it was constantly alerting me I had a new message, and, oh, did I want to read it right then? If I could get a call out it would beep at me constantly due to the new messages coming in. How long did this last? Until Saturday evening. Roughly 2.5 days.